CARLEEN TIBBETTS

some people want epics

after Lyn Hejinian

what is it to lust a city

punked by language

red life that rises

a tender gash

language is a victim

of its own success

crepuscular time

of all kinds

a derelict pattern

futuring rotted mirages

faces make no sense

dishonest happiness

gilded and only for show

patterns surging

history is an enemy

of things

what is care exactly

the tyranny of light

the slow life of

a quickening fight

in an open universe

to discover time is to

crash into one’s self

every sentence records

a stretch of becoming

invented as it goes

now the body is freed

from obligation to make

a story

the truth of the animal body

the mind demands to escape itself

the fact of water

voluptuously misunderstood

the face is made of astonishingly long numbers

ripened taut with emotion

and a gaze that worms

the little struggles of prayer

light gone rotten

the body is always softer than its image

that tender neighbor

hearts taking on so many

sheeny shapes

congratulating the idea of body

the accident of body

vicious rumors

emerging from the thin hour

the progress of symmetry

the symmetry of progress

the monitor glow

the poison of the dream house

the bang bang of being alive

witnessing the sea

the unorthodox ocean

a light at the back of the throat

a secret hex

building a home inside a question

an empty hold can’t be seen, only felt

the body is an event

heat implies body

an infested nest

a nevergreen prophet of ruin

a necrotic landscape

glutted with genre

dreams are violations

unencoded and shiny

like toys and still

quiet as hair

throbbing in tune with the

luminal pulse

afraid of edges and

the fold of the dark

a tragic feathery thing

outlasts human fantasies

desanctified problems of description

secret currents carrying

the pixel hour

sleepy with the hum of industry

the wilderness of permissions

that make myth wider

the fatal honor

of a limbed system

the last ears gossip discovers

Carleen Tibbetts is the author of dossier for the postverbal (Carrion Bloom Books, 2023), DATACLYSM.jpg (White Stag, 2019), DATACLYSM.jpg (Radioactive Cloud, 2018), and to exosk(elle), the last sugar (Zoo Cake, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Sink, TYPO, The Laurel Review, The Pinch, jubilat, Dreginald, Datableed, and other publications.  She edits poetry for Dream Pop Press.