Five Poems by Harrison Fisher

 

 

I Asked the Master to Reveal

(or Ryder Meets See See Rider: Haiku and Tanka) 

 

 

“My Vow to You”:  What the Students Sang

 

“I asked the Master

to reveal  . . .  the sincereness

. . .  of my love.”  --Students 

 

 

“see / what you have done,

now. You made me love you, now

now now now your man

has” / “Jenny Jenny Jenny,

won’t you come along with me” 

 

 

A Blare of Trumpets 

 

In the beginning,

this is a lot of noise,

three levels of trumpeting

 

let fly:

tantara,

tarantara,

and taratantara,

 

variant blares all

upon us at once.

 

“I am a lonely,

unhappy man

in this world,”

says Trebuchet,

 

causing a riot

where his human projectile

lands in the seething crowd.

 

—"I am the loneliest,

unhappiest man in the world,”

says Guillotin, physician

and official,

 

“and I have the heads

to prove it.” 

 

 

Spontaneous Generation 

 

Very thin slivers of red onion

dropped in the toilet

zip around like living things.

 

That one piece—a spinner dolphin!

Will I do well?

Will I do good?

I am no longer confident.

 

I went to my fitting:

 

HE UNDERSTOOD LITTLE AND DID LESS

 

TOMORROW’S ANOTHER DAY . . .

FOR SOMEONE ELSE

 

I WALLOWED A WHILE IN THIS SEWER

 

but I bought

 

YOU’RE STANDING IN MY

EISEGETICAL WONDERLAND

 

Back home, in a single sitting I read

the fake words “silvered,” “prismed,” and “pasteled”

 

—all unauthorized denominal verbs,

guilty pages

raising the stink of unpenned verbing,

 

and I retched so long and hard

 

it was no longer clear

I would still be counted

a steward of the planet. 

 

 

Truth, or Dare to Be False 

 

There have been so many Sasquatch sightings in Saskatchewan the locals

call their province “Sasquatchewan.” 

 

§ 

 

A famous soap admits to only 99.44% purity because of the long-standing

tradition of soap-makers to masturbate into the soap mixture, adding what

they believe to be the right amount of natural moisturizer to the blend.

 

Despite company injunctions against this behavior, the allure of self-abuse

is too great in the line of saponification, whose practitioners say predictably,

like any common cook, they are making soap “with love.” 

 

§ 

 

If you pick up a guinea pig by the tail, its eyes will drop out. So says

Ripley’s Believe It or Not—other sources, too. I myself am of no bent

to verify this.

 

I can imagine how it went for the first person to discover guinea pig eye-

dropout, the “Recluse of Amherst,” Emily Dickinson, who, a bit bored

while between poems, started playing with her domestic cavy, hoisted

him aft, and suddenly ran screaming from the room. 

 

 

The Milkman 

 

Clotted

cogitations

of the milkman:

 

Fits reward flight

from simple whiteout

 

to torn air,

those that have had

the All

 

and have delivered

its beautiful excess. 

 

It is not enough to know

where everyone lives. The future:  

I X (times) all failed field openings.

 

“I have sawt

the Klondikee of my soulle . . . “

 

Then he tells

a curdling tale—

cold, white,

 

bleak enough

to raise the substrate.

 

 

 

 

Harrison Fisher has published twelve poetry titles since 1977, including Blank Like Me, UHFO, and, most recently, Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real. In 2026, he has new work in ANTAE, BlazeVOX, Book of Matches, The Closed Eye Open, Misfitmagazine, and several other online publications. He is retired from public service and lives in upstate New York.