Posts Tagged ‘Noah West’
It Is Forgetfulness
Right of perpetual ownership that non-memory
Nor its name by aspect of province seat.
She, a young person
When returning late from grammar school
I knew of the its
Death knew that
That One believed!
And that I am a person of energy?
If there is to the saying
By the people that brought the news
I must believe, without vacillating a point,
That my name is in the pupils.
The Secret War
A leak somewhere
Along the wall
And the rushing catastrophe
The freezing water freed
It bites through the skin
To the intestines
And suddenly
It’s waist deep
The water is thick
With dirt and everywhere
Waist deep
The color of flood
Carrying the Laundry
dbeckerman.wordpress.com
The gray-black checked
shirt
crumpled how it
fell and was forgotten
was flattened by
traffic and rain
almost gone
against the rain-shined street
By Noah West
The Forgotten Mother
flickr.com
There is a splat stain high
On her chest above the heart
That rolls between
Her formless breasts to stop
On her stomach red
And sticky in the folds
Of an over sized t-shirt
It must be jelly
From a slapdash breakfast
For the still hungry boy
Who strains at her arm
Though the lines on her face
Would make you think
It’s the remnants of sacrifice
She has forgotten something
But there is no time to go back
She is alone
She mutters it under her breath
Too much on my mind
And still the hungry child
Strains at her arm
And still she plods forward
Motherhood is not supposed to be easy
She knew it she knows it
But somehow it’s not
Supposed to be like this
Plodding and alone
Her great mother’s arms
Flailing falling through cracks
Forgotten they are all
Forgotten and none of us
Are innocent anymore
By Noah West
Poem
“Though libraries are burned for the sake of truth
Fragments always survive in the necks of bottles”
-Doug Russell “The History of Beauty”
When the not
Finished
Shatter
They shatter
In the face of perfection
When
The one who was never finished
Begs
Forgiveness there is
Much to forgive but no one to do it
I won’t finish
I won’t
Even try but I work my fragments
To the bottle neck naiveté and beg
Often
For forgiveness
And it could be worse
The ones
Who finish
Won’t shatter they fall
In perfect arcs like polished stones
They burn
They never even
Think
To beg
By Noah West
The Dervish
My son knows nothing of Rumi
He’s five he barely reads at all
I’ve watched him intone
The words of his beginning reader
Until the words are washed of meaning
Until a word like run
Each letter repeated lengthened
And smoothed into the next
Becomes like a mystic litany
He’s never worn a tunic that spun
And flared and danced around his knees
But today he pinned a towel
Around his neck and called it a cape
And as I clapped he spun
And whooped and laughed and whirled
And the air above his head
Was alive and bright with life
By Noah West
The Whip in the Temple.
He smiled
At the palms crushed
To stain by the calloused hooves of the stolen donkey
And wonders
“Was anyone
The faces each like a little flame
With their halleluiahs
Getting the joke?”
The faces each like a little flame
With their serious halleluiahs
That knot like rope behind his smile
Growing
Forced
He pats the good neck of the donkey and the sinews of the scrawny neck keep his back straight
And this is where I came in
Caught
Between praise and expectation
Between the users at my back and the used up at my fingertips
The song and the sacrifice
Caught
Between the desire and the consummation
Between the lash and the coins
Piled like fortune on the fragile tables
My hallelujahs to turning the earth into sky
My hollow eyes
And he was sick of parable when he twisted the cord
His hands itched with inaction
His hands calloused by wood and hammer
Itched with inaction
And he scratched them on the cord he twisted into whip
And strode with whip in calloused hand toward the temple’s selling
And sold faces
And the terror at the arc of the whip in his hand
Stood guard at the entrance of his tomb
By Noah West
Rabid
Because outrage is a black cur
In light bulb city
Fever in the living twitch
Of nostril
And the sharp-toothed fever of rotting jaws
Because fever and nostril
And the rot of jaws
Are things beyond feed
Or pro creation or any
Washing word worked-up
By the humane
Society
To classify
The incomprehensible
Dog
I bark
And my outrage is full-mooned
By Noah West
…And Some Can’t
AP Photo: Patrick Semansky
And a dizzying height somewhere
above the sternum
or how a sudden
sudden lowering
of expectations can be logically
followed by
*
“For a joke,” he explains,
“I think you need a punch line. What you have here is
Simply a humorous anectdote.”
By Noah West
The Early Afternoon on That First Day
When the plump-fingered assassins arrived
Beating their ringing chests
And lined up like in a toy store window at the place
Where they had buried you knee deep in the earthen floor
You were gone
You had told us you would be gone but the shock
Of your actual absence
And what light there was in the little room
Sought out the steel men where we had fallen
And you were gone though I had doubted you would be
Just like the light that sticks to the steel skin
Would leave me to believe we were the only things in the room
But for the sound of a saw in a tree
That I had always imagined would sound like your laughter
By Noah West
Three Short poems
Complex of late
Winter
Branches
A mathematics
Corrupted by flight
Patterns
Of geese
In silhouette
*
Out there in the night
Performs
A special dark
With walnuts
*
If there is
I
assumed
posted by Noah West
The Mine
by Noah West
I.
It’s in the black far reaches
That he starts to feel the pressure
He begins by firing the steel
But where the steel comes from…
There are flowers that can burn
And he begins to know these flowers
They were going, celebratory,
And the beach knew how he would come.
Afterwards, he told everyone…
But everyone was already at the beach.
II.
The flowers that could exist in the blackness exerted the specific pressure that rekindled the mine
III.
I am the bricklayers burning kiln
I am the floss
I am not going to many places though
I am hurting
And I
Am the buying
That is the reason for so many
And their kiln that
Is burning tonight
IV.
There is an I and
It is and there is a
Buying and a blackened hurt
posted by Brian Feist
poMotion poetry 