Mark DuCharme is the author of We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film, Counter Fluencies 1-20, The Unfinished: Books I-VI, Answer, The Sensory Cabinet and other works. His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as BlazeVOX, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Eratio, First Intensity, Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Talisman, Unlikely Stories, Word/ for Word, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary. A recipient of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, he lives in Boulder, Colorado.
**
In Birth of Cut LaughterThere is nowhere else through my head that I explode
Full of visions with mispronounced roses inside
The crayon shuttle tripping
Like a furlough up my pillow
Until I’m always here with roses on the street
& Rain isn’t altogether as mysterious as childhood
Who goes north is still not windward
Visit the sea on Saturdays, crowded at 2:30
Plus, complete scenes of international dentistry
If only you would cough
***
Thing in Folded Paper
Don’t mumble to strangers
With smoke-crossed fingers
In bungalows you hadn’t fled
Like your predecessor
The one with the cruel mouth
You can’t teach someone
What’s not in character;
Nature nurtures
Lunch
Proceed with all you
Still don’t feel;
What you need is also
Necessary
Learn to run
Learn to ruin
Learn to run away
Learn to run again anyway
Learn later to run harder
Telekinesis in deadpan futility
Some needs fill up with those who scream them
Smoke grows distant from the trees
I tried to warn you
I tried to breathe
Sometimes, the materials
Work against us—
A residue
Left on pillows
In the outlier district—
Empty, never clear
Amid new, ransacked livelihoods
Ghost-images, debris
The page
Left blank
Most of the time—
The eye
Won’t follow
All it sees
All material
Is only a subset of
The larger body
Of material—
Think in rhythm
Earth will follow
Fate & all it
Yet contains
***
Smoke
i.
I reimagine
The didactic avant garde
Spilled across my room, this
Page
Death always startles
An excuse, maybe, but these are not
Night’s only violent seeds
ii.
Pretend you have the truth— & truth is
Smoke— pretend anyway—
Don’t pretend, just repeat—
Words are frozen
In the air before we breathe
Our bodies always similar
Extensions of the main
Idea we build upon recklessly
Where, idly, we may gaze
Fructify, redeem
iii.
Alive or livid
On arrival
As only what we are
Asleep on the floor
Without anything real
It’ll be over all in a
While before we falter
Is all we have to
Bear, or be
When living is today
iv.
Stop running
Away
Song leans
From your pillow
Gentle howling
In the wild
Night burns
But won’t advance
If the dead were
Lithographed
While leaning on night-trees
Disbelievers, really
Who fall harder to the floor
If it doesn’t rain anymore
In plaster figurine mishaps
Like demigods of youth &
Removal—
In birth or breath remaining
What we are
