A Captain beefheart song; a restless leg tweaking me from a dream into wakefullness; an imagined suburb in Forth wayne Indiana--where I never actually lived--and Jewish tombstone design...a crowded little room where you wouldn't want to spend too much ti


Night 2.5

"All you new dinosaurs
now it's up to you to choose
Before your feet hit the tar
you'd better kick off those
old shoes...It sure looks
funny for a new dinosaur
to be in an old one's shoes,
dinosaur shoes, Dinah Shore Shoes..."
Captain beefheart, "Smithsonian institute Blues (the Big Dig)"

Every-evening
as dueling anxieties drive through
miasma in turgid mud-scrimmage
of competing Manichean dualisms
my stink antennae rises greasily into
mysto cognition along the skyline anthers
oozing the underbelly of gently sown night
like a small poppy scalpel cutting hot-tar steam
surgical style micro-excisions of
small star sections
into black de-suctioned
violence—an absence of unknowable
bodies...
"Seems like I could keep sweeping
and sweeping and there's still
too many feet..."
The sky is abstruse as black
as afghan-opium from prairie-poppy seeds
secreting their mathematically precise effluent.
Drumming interwoven upside now
the sky like a missile tourniquet on heavy
steed legs drilling for a single needle hole
into which an atmospheric infusion—
the infusion from all of the lost stars
un-noticed—dripped heavy steam
back along the razor itinerary,
micrometer measurement
of a tektite glass molecular carapace.
Small things always go un-noticed;
the single pituitary-beetle scratch-hole,
the worm-sheath, the fish-garter,
the intuited turtle tunic, or whale corset—
inserted silently and placed
on adjacent pylon
emblazoned with two hands
forever praying
with its metatarsal strong
flex of batter and mind
and recapitulation of stone,
of ornery repetitive motion...

JZRothstein (final edit) 8/28/2013




Poetry by Jeffrey Z Rothstein
Read 500 times
Written on 2013-10-02 at 17:39

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I went from puzzled, to scowling, to smiling, to chuckling by the end. I don't know if that was the intent, but "fish garters" put me over the top. Stream of consciousness may not float everyone's boat, but I like it. It's as insightful as any verse, formal or otherwise, and I've written my fair share.

One quibble, for what it's worth:

Drumming interwoven upside now
the sky like a missile tourniquet on heavy
steed legs drilling for a single needle
hole into which an atmospheric infusion—

the break after "needle" is awkward, the flow between "needle" and "hole" comes to a screeching halt. Perhaps "needle hole" in one line would work better.
2013-10-04