THIS
I keep a beard or a mustache so I can recognize
myself, amid the dense crowds
the doglike cracking on the walls
that I’ve added to my responsibilities
that’s so happy when I come down the stairs
for a live concert.
This sea videos my riches, even after the sex departs
from technique
and squatting upon my miserichord,
I feel the muscle memory of beef au jus, the luster of townsfolk headed
home from this aquarium ––
this forbearance that tests the shelving structures of agua vita. This
storm-cloud that swept in
rotten like a log covered in hands
but you can’t feel tickled shoes, can you, the mocking of the dead. The security
detail of soft Oriental forests that discreetly turns its back.
*
This intrusion of pleasure
amid tagends of velocity and torque
This amphora in place of frightening lightning.
I lay my hand upon Hekate’s gelatin mould
as if to steady the heaving bosoms of water buffalo.
This Dionysius again.
*
Left me here with only visibility beans
to escape into the audience.
This is still my previous incarnation,
rude awakenings are still shining
on this autumnal movie of playing a country style
anal flute. This poem too, is just some variety
that’s been a long time coming.
This thinking machine retrofitted for time of scarcity. This
abdominal remembrance of things past.
This she is a metaphor, for I have a wife at home
and my wife will know when you read this
in the pale light of the brain-scan, for one is but graven images
and chirruping critters in the sodden leaves utterly beholden to both
household, local, and even federal programs found within the human
body.
I came home to explore new avenues of nausea.
STORY TIME
Feckless hadn’t learned the meaning of dirt chimes
when he came to interview these homeless statements.
After a moment when no one said anything
in a vulnerable state, unable to verify the senses
harassed all night after 9:00 P.M. –– Feckless was,
by hecklers who live out there in the grass.
O gates of Brass, I am at the Edge of Tears.
The wind blows through the collapsed manors (slowly);
aggregates pull out covered in mother pearly slime.
The youth opened up the gates of Food that lined
the peasant devoid hills in the creepy mauve light, opened the soft
reggae and saw the weights of a counter-balance swing
or she took off her halter top to expose infinite taint,
serpentine shit, arcane attachments to the journey of the stars.
O gates of capricious mouse loins without proportion!
O gates of Roundup and visual siege, interview these
college level institutions. Let them know
projected amusements garden the cum in our veins.
Tamas Panitz is the author of several poetry books, most recently Wild Lies (New Books: 2023), and Vesuvio with Joel Newberger and Losarc Raal (New Books: 2023) Other books include Conversazione, interviews with Peter Lamborn Wilson (Autonomedia: 2022), and The Selected Poems of Charles Tomás; trans. w/Carlos Lara (Schism: 2022). He now co-edits the journal NEW, which he co-founded. He is also the author of a pornographic novella, Mercury in Lemonade (New Smut Series: 2023).His paintings and stray poems can be found on instagram, @tamaspanitz. His book of essays on forgotten 19th Century American poets, The Sleepers, is forthcoming from The Swan (2024).