Two Poems | Joshua Bird

Sun at Passages

The city mouths off at the seam

The city sheds what it can

Page one is called Off

Page two is In Between Tangiers

and Page Three

Page three a sluice of this

Practitioner of eclecticism light the flood

streets abrupt or designed until

each corner grew outward

Sleep is alleged

The desire to build this hollow

framework into more than a house

Caesurae never sleep

The design came back empathy

He uttered the same last words for a year

before he changed his mind

Discreet paper-thin whorls

or elaborate renaming days, yes

I have made each of these moths​​ 

out of the name Michael​​ 

Settling too close to recognize the text,

the touch Yesterday is not a concept

to be considered

Dear shelf

dear fourth wall

Sun at passages

Dear dear and dear lack of

Landscape

I’m sitting between four more walls

unable to break free of margins

The untold iteration we continue

in your pattern and applause when indicated

I design the new letters

without reference

to pages that turn

themselves

in, into, addenda, shades

of botany where grey was a place on the dog

The voice is talking out of the frame

The irreducible metaphysical unit

(of reference)

this time the cereal is soggy

Morning nearly always a point

of​​ contact

with a body

The house sits alone and I in the house

I extract the house​​ 

The page the door once a color

and coffee colors seep into the gutter

until the spine is malleable, aloof

Dear moth, did you get lost

wondering why no one

follows

Escapism in Five (or so) Parts

1.

Titles fall at the ends

of Calends, few days gone onward

instead of a que

This being maybe a bad

influence on your sub

terranean

where half-light of near sleep

turns on the penumbra, turns Thursday

out,​​ identical

identity in nearly all the other shadows

(written as shadows)

even when Theatrical City

blots out the obvious narrative

made with one I close

to a dream called

‘this dream’ or ‘remember this’

or ‘one pen equals one I’

2.

Lines gestalt and​​ stop

fingers then palms accuse each

other of writing in dying

languid

Minutiae outward of a

Glimpse curves, we the serial

clouds converge upon a mystifying apogee

The context is aloud

A trick to recapture the sun

in a manuscript by none other

Flowers in an intermittent garden

begin to trace the arc

of my hands, forgetting

the source, the scour of attar

Planet of Golden Ice

Rock of mellifluousness

So-named to invert telescopes

back into the sire represented

on the surface of a map

an uncial stain

3.

A sudden standstill, moths

in the still frame

prepositions wayward

The biography writes me off​​ 

a list of chapters

Realism makes the claim

the self belongs elsewhere

if the conversation ends

up restricting passages to what we

think of​​ inward

The sentence (this) is sensitive to vertigo

Clumps of​​ dhghem

in October colorings

of an open mouth

forfeiting the next sound

Descendants of papyrus suck at worshiping

the preserves, the corpse

of a very old god

4.

The philosopher got out of​​ their page again

With extreme prejudice force has been​​ 

authorized for the good of

5.

Having built this ‘I’ from sound up

Having built this else

where the framework is taken apart

before the rest could be

Having letters thrown against his self

bones rolling upward despite

seen through slants

in Tangerines

where no order is necessary