poems from Long Secrets in Air

Ryan Skrabalak

Darnkess

for Cameron Scott

Glaucous & purely obtained from the river

John Coltrane’s on a languorous metal

this line moves pretty fast, actually

the river does not depend on you

concerned with obtusity, greened pulse

along thought hewn from a gone place

it's all departure, it's a certain thinness

behind the ontological sum of plastics

so even nothing named to be caress

applause for climax, a secret method

fleshy underside of rosed, murky blare

the sentences are here and working

spun and chewing on meadow tempo

denomination stipulates back of mind

famously or unseasonably cold, a Pontiac

presents an un-upheaval as brassy theory

among the keyless blathers, hot mouths

I liked it there, everyone’s insides, rather

a measure of acuteness than spacial

threat on chatter, a small mention humming

wide, pressing matters, psalmic heckler’s

leaky stripes on the derivative pale emission

I liked it here, and sometimes men's chords

go east for sake of translation's sane looting

Median

Pewter jawline explode white toodleoo surrogate

Bandits explain a duo of wet deer monologues

hovering in sunken pumpkin grove, the meandered firewall

Millenium Hilton contempo painted swoosh-of-heaven

Stating erect as the ballistic linens of the sun roll

Not taken by anything's empty miscellaneous kiosk

It’s a gone place, frothy peppermint oil to dream

an algorithm of glowing music booked for a room

In my time of writing I was loving shapes of a shadow

the intermezzo was grafted to a candle outside

voices in debt and too broke to matter

which gave me a certain freedom tethered to a chorus

Congregational humiliation encumbered typical mists

quite indigo on my concern from the side of the road:

I don’t know, maybe constant absence or

I had done it all wrong, someday it will be good

again, demand this of ourselves

And Boy if I Get Drunk I Get

For Pete’s sake I’m telling the music no

words hide the world like something else

the music is like a photograph of vapor

bronchial, but chiefly granted frontier

embroidered, but permission for hot riffs

doubtless, but curled on pyrite lips

to integrate myself into the creek's braids

in the separate distances came the heard

with space it was given cavern essence

its red and sort of stylish silken flume

all the gloss brightened syllable filters

a figure in doorjamb thick chalcedony

autodidactic repression’s sung frisson

In all things you saw the invisible vitreous

waxy opaque superstructure of capital

celestial, but not without glib reason

rolling breath farewell to blown increase

it’s a twitchy, impossible template

of which no one really needs to shape

stepping in to it this time, froze prisms

rubbing stinky crystals in Effingham, IL

as an act of god, Ryan, believe this to be

truckers gliding along the dawny cumbucket

median daisies swaying along Olde English

vanilla shadows, tonally, a crucifix, an RV

I'm so ashamed of issuing myself plainly—

Saxtons River

But it doesn’t matter saying what through

In memoriam stun a sun blue gun shown

the bell’s hushed lash of power in heat

My chinos rolled tight, mid-crick

turning bolted schist over, that I loved

each one come loose and cloud

The microerotics of each underside

's discovery felt almost bad, then

darker, diligently scraping a belt of sky's

the mud with no windows, this guilt

or this why are the words, arriving late

now ever, my knuckles graze the afternoon

upon the pain of its briars, which cover

the wall I am building when I turn down

stream, miss, please can you point me

where a song has bent hours

into the moon’s pregnant diphthong

Mouthy Attempt

Everything has been thought of before but

The difficulty is to think of it again

This scale of thinking is a certain nightmare

down which the glass sprinting hallway I parallel

That this is what the light holds in tense grip

That when I arrive at the light's end I am house-poor

That the air this time, here, is see-thru

But I can hold its hand plainly, and begin to modify

my thoughts, issued from a thick, expired rainbow

So deep into the groove perhaps I might have been

born in it, of its dandy watermelon dominion

and anyways I hate metaphor, that bastard

But I'm dancing to find myself a new body

Felt the asymmetry of its poetry tear me out

Cover mine own heart with a tumid map violetly

spangled with small gnomic words that shrieked

violently “Good morning!” A small hook yanked me

smooth, painless, like a chord, by the navel

to a pink murmur, which was everyone's future

A crocus, too, to send us good news, finally

Exhaling the DMT on Neill's back porch

in Trumansburg, seconds elapsed gothic

I kissed time on the lips but actually, it was Adam

What is happening and how have you been

Maybe the people would be the times or between

Rhinestone Salve

I would like to leave the arena continuously:

whistled & listening to the world’s fizzy spittle

A rumor yourself reminiscent of y/our viscera

The field off to lunch or possibly self-destructing

Passport blue shrubs whizz ochre aire crickets

and my eyes can’t discern stars commuting

fantastic cream in pockets of dirty zloty

Plums of occult bodega arrangements:

August's oblong corvids magnetize

an occidental suitcase or callow apology

used as law for art exploring our “home” “land”

Long living the gerund and kaleidoscopic passerine

memories of chromatic communisms of gerunds, too

The future's payroll o gavage o silvery drag

Thighs margin the starlit heart of the carpark:

at the denouement of the calcified zenith

fortune's long tongue harvests orgasm

Lithic Analysis

Here’s a golden rule I just thought of.

Metaphors’ve been occurring here, SAY,

prisms hung from his glans,

calves yawned in the sunflake's

who is this house even for

Or that this empire whittled me

to PROD the mystery

Jasper, pink on one half,

naked, with my friends

around a store-bought lake

in the midden's weird shadow

I’ve been doing okay despite

everything I’ve been doing

okay despite everything

I’ve been doing a little

black rock smoldering

lemon between my pupils

Despite it all being cake,

well, my JOB, knapped from

expanses of cash-only sky

I've come to prove my swelling

as a shirt is, SAY, inevitable

a pressed collar's dead labor

to write around A VILLAGE

Pockets of bicentennial quarters

proof of my human verb

the SHINE of this empire’s train

today’s attempt to organize

an surplus of friction

Living A Woo Pig Lifestyle

in a small fairy circle just past

a pilgrim of mutter, SAY, knees

bloodied with debitage then

washed in the soft digital surf

I mean, a froth of protozoa sings

among the wilting spangled ore,

hippies dry-whistling Donovan

hot gloom and its present canopy

They can't see us in here—

Didn't sell anything today—

To make it, barely, a happiness—