curtis emery

Sonnet 1

Hello ghost world-- endofworldgrey fog death

Primitive budding bubblememory

Past fertile witness holding breath goldspace

Last green christperfect insardoodledom

Hello imagine’d sex true love’s crown’d lilt

Truelove’s hands true love’s back truelovedream deep

& folded tight into mine firmament

Hello babbling first light talkative morning

Before day sense’s wholehandpull forward

Decide which dream to dash against & know

Each moment a bouquet of moments a Flower of possibility a prism

Sonnet 2

Trouble Trouble winter in duplicate

A happy poem for another time

Here channeled timely into this moment

A flower A daystar A crystal light

My dreamself come and sing a frozen song

Hum hum I love my life and light hum hum

My brain is a synthesized wonderful--

Ghost world envelope edges bristling

Armful of snow emdashed to an afterthought

A fistthought, THE PAST dashed cross the morning

Silly little hum, my light thought

Heavy water, pillow tree, the shed’s twin

Hope is palpable, hold it in a bag

But outside the dream each second subtracts

Sonnet 3

Getting further to the middle of it

tiny tiny earworm works into dreamme

got to get my hands in it war swarms elsewhere

minor moments little deaths pinging back

same wave warm filter your throw away eye

there ankle deep in peak’d waking state

actual measures of quaking light like

shades of like familiarities

like I cannot bore into god (springsong)

& they cannot work into me (springlight)

come and sing a song in me minor death

little moments at the heart of myself

dreamme sleeps a little while longer

hum hum I love my life and light hum hum

Sonnet 4

Wonder will we go to war tomorrow

glowwormme in the blind spot of my mind

swinging pendulum time stop nudge forward

me watching dreamme chase atomic trails

pendulum warmind a ghost world’s border

who’s the god at the end of my sequence

here, caught a whiff of sunflower oil

there, caught sitting thinking of my death

poem’s got a way of morphing flipping

mirror’d stretch’d drawn tight cross galaxy rim

nuclear portamento conscious of

serial moments wiping together

little moments I sing of you sweetly

our time moves linear step after step

Sonnet 5

See myselfsequence pilfered from thin air

mondegreen floats in on winter breeze

time slips then catches no springsame birdsong

no springsame budding just endofworld air

just another apocalypsemelt hum

on whose shoulders my futurehead rests hum

no talking in the life box just sit still

ghost world comes & recounts light’s follies

see? dreamme is a crystal’d sequence

transpose’d the air mystique in front of me

hints of myselfsequence just silk tendrils

sleep prism traps light waveform like echoes

godbreath freezing that which I create

I love my life breath & where I breathe it

Sonnet 6

Rain drift semitone watching osprey dive

river timbre sustain delay tracking wake line

imperfect ducking ebb flow tide filters

fear of no time tripping on echoes

I return to the river after all

and will the river reoccur to me?

spin panic in the shower spin the drain

absolute gender an overflowing

each inch in accordance to what you see

an ever naming of what you cannot

but thought &though to whom unknown

ghost world sequence turtle grass mark’d envelope

I’m running headlong into a rain cloud

It’s me my thoughts lightning around the crown

Sonnet 7

like Sobin said :: “worm token; gutted suns”*

or something like that :: etch’d on my forearm

suretotal eclipse of the singing throat

black hole song here I come :: melt’d eye

molten skin :: pulse radiant brain pit pulse

I carve my dirtname and say it back

curtis curtis curtis birds sing in sync

organize the notes by color flourish

how heavy is your birdsong morning light?

which turning bell horn runs this spool

dry golden fleece run reel to reel to reel

Uncover a third pole on which we spin

elastic spiritual band forever

I am a tiny worm working a dirt clod

time runs all things through & through all things me

“worn tokens; gutted sums” from TRANSPARENT ITINERARIES:1991 by Gustaf Sobin

curtis emery is a queer poet from Massachusetts—they’ve appeared in Blush Lit, dirt child, Conjunctions, Reality Beach, ELDERLY, pastsimple, LIBERTINES IN THE ANTE-ROOM OF LOVE: Poets On Punk [Jet Tone Press 2019] & DEVOURING THE GREEN: fear of a human planet: a cyborg / eco poetry anthology [Jaded Ibis Press 2015]. curtis is on the web at curtisemery.net