If I say “Poultry” or “The March of the Boyars,”
would that be a poem?
Would shrapnel make a difference?
I feel so alone.
So, today, and maybe tomorrow,
we come face to face with dignity.
Inaudible frequencies compete for dignity.
(Emphasis: inaudible. We take this on faith.)
Autumn accomplishes autumn with effortless dignity.
During Lent one is especially alert to dignity.
Conversely, one learns to ignore star toots.
Tooting stars violate dignity.
Chairman Mao at People’s Sundown
orders the People’s Sunrise. Elsewhere, I don’t know
the Chinese term for diktat or how to prepare
sticky Chinese pork belly. I also cannot distinguish
trembling lumps from chilly idiots,
nor do I find papier-maché lifeboats amusing.
Poems begin in the mouth.
I’m thinking of kapok.
k’pok! k’pok!
Like gunfire with corks.
We gather for the hemorrhage.
We slap each other.
A horn blows. We cheer.
We pour ourselves some smoke.
We punch dead horses.
One of us dies (viz., the hemorrhage).
It’s useless, these syrupy poses.
It is exquisite, driving to see Seattle.
It is also exquisite driving to see Sasquatch,
his soggy feet, his russet buboes, all exquisite,
all forgivable. Exquisite rural alarums and excursions,
we forgive them, likewise an exquisitely crafted tower where
someone is waving, perhaps at you. It is also exquisite
here on the boiled carpet.
I like to think of my poems seeking solace
under old wallpaper, insubstantial
as Schrödinger’s Chihuahua.
I sometimes think of abandoning my poems
at a lakeside wharf, where, on a cloudy afternoon,
you and I evaporate.
Do you often mow the lawn where
homicidal maniacs
doze?
Hunkered down in my little house,
I conceal many large-caliber revolvers about my person.
To the casual intruder I look lumpy.
Turning my little house like a page is difficult.
Nor does the doorbell work.
This pleases me.
Between you and the eulogy per
haps something’s ed
ible.
Among the asterisks, mollusks. Zola
(nom de plume), envisions warts on nihilists
out there, somewhere, taken on faith, lost as we are
in a morning’s diaspora.
It’s Wednesday, dear diary,
an event Mother Nature
notes from her trench.
Water not the turnstiles!
They are not tulips!
My plaisir, my ragout,
your plaisir, your kazoo,
et voilà Stu! Peut-être Peru!
A man, Come Here to Me at Once Which Went to Him at Once,
tilted Hairy’s chin. Moskuld’s mother was Thorgeld,
the daughter of Redder and of Oofa the Whiter, and Ingald Nowhere,
also of Helgi and Thora Du Du and Shake a Snake,
the son of Hairy Breaks and Aud the Deep Minded, the daughter of
Chastised with a Kettle, the son of Boner, the first Bishop of Ice Land,
also of Yetti and Snake in the Grease, whose father tilted
Hairy Breaks. Hoskuld Hvitaness Priest put on the cloak, fistmele
in one hand, nothing in the other. Njalsson sailed from Orkney.
Sigfusson was also preparing to sail.
Ipecac! Dearest! What our seeds made us,
where our deeds took us, creeping,
weeping, O how they shook us,
O how they baked us! O how they raked us!
Ipecac! Belovèd! Mouths are for shouting,
but nobody’s listening,
nobody’s smiling for miles and miles,
nobody’s glistening, nobody’s floating, nobody’s creeping,
nobody’s scowling, nobody’s pleading,
nobody’s bleeding.
Ipecac! Divine! Backup? Hiccup?
That you, Bacchus? Bring the wine?
Roast the swine?
Zoom! The poet leaks through a slot in the gloom!
The poet prevails! Down with impediments! Religion,
to you the poet makes this gift of sailing earth
he invites you to call an avalanche.
Thank you. The poet’s blindest friend rolls cigars.
And of the colleagues huddled at the silo sorting silage,
and of the flicker of passerby seborrhea
anticipating snow.
A homeopath moves to a prairie.
He finds me must deal with bison.
He lies in wait at night, making threatening noises
in the midrange (500Hz to 2kHz) that
bison find intolerable.
Nothing fits.
The dog disappears.
The palm fronds creak.
You smile drowsily,
rub the sleep from your eyes
and jump up and down on the hammock.
In formality’s embrace, a poet asks,
Where’s my hat? Who took my coat?
From an icy conceit to a stool in a bar, a poet asks,
Is it possible to write poems that don’t mention Nazis?
Of course it is! Poems should be about
small floodlights under pajamas.
Mike Silverton is most recently the author of Anvil on a Shoestring (2022), Trios (2023), and Yoga for Pickpockets (2024).
His poetry appeared in the late '60s and early '70s in Harper’s, The Nation, Wormwood Review, Poetry Now, some/thing, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner, Elephant and other publications he may have (and most likely) mislaid. William Cole included Mike’s poems in four anthologies: Eight Lines and Under, Macmillan, 1967; Pith and Vinegar, Simon and Schuster, 1969; Poetry Brief, Macmillan, 1971; and Poems One Line & Longer, Grossman, 1973.
As a culture go-getter, Mike produced poetry readings for The New School for Social Research, New York’s municipal radio station, WNYC, and Pacifica Radio’s WBAI, KPFA, and KPFK. One glaring regret: Mike had arranged to record Frank O’Hara on the week in which he was killed, the weekend intervening, by a dune buggy.
Mike’s music writing, centering on modernist classical, appeared in Fanfare, a bimonthly review, and several Internet publications, including his own LaFolia.com. Mike's reviews of high-end audio hardware appeared in the main in The Absolute Sound, a print publication, and StereoTimes.com. For the unlikely audiophile reading this, Mike's speakers are Wilson Audio Sasha W/P.
When Mike and Lee relocated from Brooklyn to Midcoast Maine in early 2002 he indulged an interest in Dadaesque assemblage, resulting in several works in a group show at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, and a one-man show at Belfast’s Aarhus Gallery. Mike and Lee’s 1842 house and barn are peppered throughout with work he’d have preferred to sell. (Jefferson Davis spent a night, obviously at an earlier time. Really.)