Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Twenty-one
Winter 2009
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The Bruise Of Description
John Olson

       A dawn is anything moss. We dawdle among the mechanisms on the boulevard holding peas of reality, black screwdrivers in our beams. Christmas feels like a scarf in the fog. You can engender a storm easily by holding the warm eye of a firecracker. That red rag over there is an avalanche of folds with a bug on it. I have taped a candle to the elevator so that when the veils of illusion lift we will be able to see ourselves in globules of yellow incense. We are at war with data. Handshakes bounce around on the floor limpid and tall and vast with fingers. We are in a realm of enchantment. We are taut with perpendicularity. I welcome your eyes among these words. These words will lead your eyes to the end of this sentence where an honest reticence will unfold in humidity revealing a system of misinterpretations and fjords. Molecules, habits, and straw. Names whose sounds are surrounded by ink. Imbued with the bruise of description. There is a big difference between tea and coffee. Between a commercial bank and an investment bank. Perhaps it is apparent by now that I am writing this during a time of great financial insecurity. This is why we give names to experiences. If the sound of something travels up and down the spine it could eventually weigh as much as a jade perception. A yardarm whose sail has just been unfolded, tumbling down in a cascade of incipient flaps. We’re on our way now. Going where, I don’t know. There are laws, and there are roads. Roads do not always follow laws and laws do not always follow roads. The music of the present tense juggles vast quilts of hectic eternity. Some ideas are too nebulous to be considered as thought. They drift among the woodwinds attenuated and sweet. A little espresso clings to the bottom of the demitasse. Reading becomes honey, a slow contemplation of light as it passes through a medium of lassitude, a latitude cathartic as foam. Skeletons honored by the truth of linoleum. Remember the way floors used to look? The many swirls? The many cracks and stains? This is how meaning builds on a sheet of paper. This is where reveries are lurid as the pulse of the wrist. Where the borders are uncertain. Where the skin itself is a revelation. Where everything is permitted. Where all is forgiven. Where mass is mass and moss is anything green in the mist.

About John Olson

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