Three Fascinating Poems by Daniel Nemo

 

A Forest 

 

No one listens to poetry, it’s true.  

 

Although it makes up a non-synthetic impulse

in each dynamic of revelation.

 

Can’t tell which is which

in the shape we have just taken.

 

We’re kobolds of the mythic universe.

We inhabit some eternity

a slush pile

 

aside from most

baptismal interference.

 

We’re not beautiful or even good

but we live out of reach

in the phase-out of tomorrow

of the tomorrow after that.

 

Sometimes you hear us

sometimes you don’t.

 

Nothing ever happens here,

the illusion of the ozone layer

comes apart together with the ozone layer. 

 

Amorphous procession,

near-stopless.

 

Biotransformation of unrest.

 

 

See these lines approach you,

you, the reader, as factors of such agency

presented–a turning back is what is gained,

not lost.

 

If only there was an echo. 

 

 

Notes:

No one listens to poetry – in reference to Thing Language, by Jack Spicer

If only there was an echo – in reference to Jonah, by Marin Sorescu

A Victory for the Sultan and the Queen of Spades 

 

In the dream the man stood in a grove

with his palms facing outward,

showing the way, blue as if he’d dipped them in blue ink.

Smoke billowed up behind him. Perhaps mist. 

Something had been burning,

or we were being engulfed in a cloud.    

 

He said, The City’s come to take the place of nature–

nature as disorder.

All depth bent in. High density of the near and contiguous.

Half the time formless, as if nobody can reach it,

the other blocked by objects in the dark

like an old music box.

 

What if we lived

in a round night recalled

over a distant city,

 

       we’d remember ourselves already flown–

 

if what we call time

wasn’t comprised of days or hours, mere segments

devised only to break up duration, but of something similar to pixels,

components that produce an image,

 

or maybe of regenerative matter,

like skin, whose cells spontaneously generate new tissue.

 

Consider the music box.

 

It sits idle yet when you open it

it springs into life and sings its song. 

 

 

Note:

We’d remember ourselves already flown – in reference to Indivisible, by Laynie Browne

 

Central Locking 

 

You can play a music piece so differently

it becomes a different piece.

 

Playing it backward

there’s a sense of being followed.

 

Say:

 

compose me

a replacement.

 

Soft-touched

by a ghostdance>> transferring

to mezzotint>> transferring to aquatint

 

the squares on the floor

have many drawers.

 

The dreamscape contains everything.

 

Watercress distorts

like spherical umbrellas.

Dragonflies swarm

fluttering mid-flight.   

 

The sky above revolves,

you remain motionless.

 

What connection is there between things?

 

 

To the left you see the outline of a church.

The hand of a clock turned

away from the wall,

 

a few trees,

edging the forest

maybe, to the right.

 

The grey sky inbetween.

 

But why is there

a bellhop waiting on the stairs?

 

It reminds you you bear gifts.

Daniel Nemo is the founder and editor of Exilé Sans Frontières – An Immigrant's Reactor For The Arts, an online literary magazine. His poetry has also appeared or is forthcoming in Dream Catcher, Brazos River Review, Off the Coast (as Daniel Reiss), Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, and Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters. For more information, see www.danielnemo.com.