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Image by Noah Silliman

In the twee rainswept hours…

The poet dwells in a state he calls 'in-transmutable into words' where the spectre of unholy dreams and fears haunts him.  

Below that rocky headland

known as the subconscious

dwells a state called

Intransmutable Into Words

It is out here

I sometimes find myself

as if spewed forth

from some unholy dream:

Forest of fears unrealized

Darkness without recourse to a heart

And I chance to wonder whether the cure

might not be worse than the disease

the alternative less fraught with

promises of indefatigable terror

As if such midnight hues could be kept at bay

by those oft-called the trappings of permanence

To know one’s cage, then love it is a secret

to be carried to one’s watery grave and beyond

Vintage Wood Clocks

Questions for Chronos

Despite appearances, nothing has changed ruminates the poet philosophically.

 

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How to convince people, anyone,

of the superfluity that is time?

impart to them, dear Chronos

that despite mere appearance

nothing has really changed

for some time now...?

Because if you can get past

the vast compendia

those name and their

variously traumatized Psyche

you will see that we as a species

have been set on repeat for

a good fifteen thousand years now,

if not very possibly more

at least since staves were laid by

and an ill-advised forebear thought

How to leverage these wide open plains

into a backhoe and a handful of beans?

Making Notes

Absalom Cortes’s wanderlust carried him to the farthest-flung corners of the world. A love of language spurred him to document what he found there. These poems are drawn, in part, from that record. Absalom Cortes’s poetry has appeared in the online journal Rigorous.

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