investigating assembled and isolated references late into the night, with dawn spiralling around on the perimeter of my thoughts and bed drawing me seductively near.
in the instant that i looked up
and saw straight into your eyes,
i opened the squeaky screen door
between the mind and the outside world.
a common literary occasion drew tabloid pearldivers seaking cut-and-paste manna for front page news.
the present felt itself up in the lonely room of its adolescence, dreaming of tomorrow's ultra-fine women dressed up or dressed-down, trying to run away from yesterday's unbearable aloneless and the hand that feeds it.
armed with a brief idea of the explicit and the implicit the elementary school librarian proceeded to stock the shelves with a tasteful selections of hard-core porn, losing her job three weeks later unexpected to herself and to the entire community known as Stuck In Hell, Montana.
the ballerina came out. graceful, subsequently sublime dances sliped from her slippered feet like smooth honey running down the lips of the audience as they shivered in the air-conditioned theater with thoughts of the return home traffic.
pronouncements of understanding come as often as a dime-store sale of Gucci, and it makes me wonder what's wrong with this country we live in.
the discovery of union is the only obstacle in the way of a two-ton elephant deciding you'd make a good place to sit.
the exciting sum of things surprised the math major who had grown accustomed to subtraction, integrals and the wonder of pi.
accompanying ideas imply postures i will not concede to, will not contort to, and cannot control.
labelling the appearing crevices did wonders for the follow-up crew from Rand McNally but did little for the group of bicyclists bouncing across the great expanse of the unknown.
the bridge stretched out, onto and across a loose span suitable for spatial minds.
freshly-squeezed, widely familiar taste of something we'd all just like to forget.
periods of time once present came back to feed upon me leaving behind the bones which only got stuck in its teeth.
a novel's own process is to destroy a passing interest, having strangled any enthusiasm by page three, mutilating any pleasure by the end of chapter two, and destroying any notion of a follow-up by story's end.
called both doubt and delight within the mind,
forcing itself to pull the loose strand
and undo the weave.
made real in death, movement and compassion both lost their sleek, stockinged appeal.
the emptiness at night's fall
raises the flag to half-mast,
the space in the morning pauses to observe
the enviable vastness of the world.
leaping years are for the leap horses: none of us could jump that far.
another boy finishing his childhood:
measuring another moment
in terms of a lifetime
, describing his virginity
in terms of ice ages gone by.
the observant admire what is permitted and avoid what is not, the rest of us just trip on all the exposed cords of the universe.
imposing a poetry upon tears
and fears upon cathedrals.
involved in a movement towards the epic:
absence becomes mockery,
notion absorbs childhood,
the pastime of heros
or the pulling of wool over one's eyes
observes a permitted vacation.
the usual mundane
(as opposed to the "exceptionally mundane")
arouses the naming of interests
between the commonplace and indulgence.
a radically different invention left the world with a half-dozen more headaches and a brand new infomercial on late night television, nothing more and nothing less.
significant solitude
depends upon the vastness of compression
brought upon by the expansion of gases and hot air
from a crowd full of people who are unaware
the slightness of magnitude made his heart drop, his soul devoured, and any hopes of breaking the loneliness that night disappear.
And all of the wonders of religion and deep belief in vanishing, were better expressed then in all of the years before, pumped down our throats.
an expression of emotion, and i don't know if i can handle it.
order them identical rather than give them reason for being the same: uniformity makes for familiarity.
meaning closely lingers at the backdoor on the alley, the one which is so dark and feels so dangerous but is your only escape.
imagine nobody and the image in your head is one I've painted with oils a hundred times.
learn because of truth, if not because of Trivial Pursuit.
she was
ugly alone, cause unknown.
I was bad
and glad,
and just disowned.
the old man
with the house on the corner
grows poetry out of habit
destroying lines with many uses
tossing them into the fire to keep him warm,
and just maybe
to keep him company.
the frequency of glimpses towards the real increases the further away you get.
the undefined may therefore suffer a severe downturn in popularity in the years to come as everyone realizes it pays to know wherein the hell you are and where you might be headed.
facts are the experience of things bewitched the things in which people put their absolute faith in.
speaking simply: hazards are a good thing to find when your lost, engaged with no clue where you're going.
everywhere, history fades from view, repeating like a howitzer in the hands of a 12 year old school kid selling pencils on park avenue.
applying fact to imagination like a clerk in a government office with two hours left until retirement.
my imaginary physical existence kept me from noticing that my zipper was undone.
a novelist created in a shrunken world writes 200 lines and calls it a bestseller.
the syntax of a classroom sonnet scratches the ear and fragments the mind.
gradual perfection slips away from us as we look for a store selling "Perfection in about an hour."
however, validity fades as our life's credentials expire and we forget to get them renewed.
the moving contrast between awareness and any sort of action based upon that glimpse of understanding.
the formlessness of the mundane in pale, muted tones easily overlooked, forgotten, and ignored.
continuous art, I call it life's scenery.
shallow responses to a created illusion, the audience mumbled their way out of the theater to quickly forget whatever it was they had just seen.
something between the beginning and middle,
but nowhere near the end
lies a wealth of happiness and wisdom
which we are all blindly wandering towards.
a flexible, modern discussion involves chaging the channel mid-sentence.
regardless of simplicity, we are stuck with a complexity we had no clue we were getting.
a true hero is one who is able to allow the truth to mature and form then spread without feeling the slightest threat or regret.
the variety of interests within my attention, but I have only so much time.
a comment made articifical what had forever been assumed quite natural, and that tiny disruption led to the end of the world as we know it.
merely virtue won't get you far in a world which only takes American Express.
philosphers form explanations between former experience and simple white lies which they feed to us with little golden spoons then shove the pacifier back in and leave.
form-fitting, existing matter: the spandex of life.
human poetry is waking up in the morning one more time.
a statue on canvas leaves the sculptur chiseling 3-dimensional delusions for a world hungry for 2-dimensional interpretations.
poetry in conventional language is a fish out of water.
the significant mark of isolation is puberty, shyness, and a face-full of acne.
an endlessly hazardous bluejay stumbled, fell, spiralled down into the nest of a robin, was kicked out, fell, tumbled down to the ground where a little girl found him, took him home, stuck him in a cage and forgot.
copyright © 1996 Matte Elsbernd