Matt Margo- Two Poems

lines shifting

lines shifting themselves into shapes:
denim shapes, found shapes…

denim drug-and-out, i have read your play.
offer your usual prank of goat heads, prompting

some obituaries,
electronics, ordeals, an aesthetic, a beloved buffet…

electronics took of electronics, electronics with personnel—
i am the electronics,

i am a townie’s clank,

always the sewer, the dramatic communion…

to the syringe sleeping in the weatherman:
come as you are, tarry not over your traffic!

take, oh, take those longbows away!
take all my mallets, my mallets, yea, take them all!

the frail lip of junk opens its red navy.
stamina, the sycophant stimulant, is this year’s pleasant lampshade.

aloof and lumberjack-hearted, i take to the open rumple.
my music stands at the statuesque drudgery, laughing…

i do not understand the portraits who tell me to stare;
i do understand excrescence.

everyone looks at me as if i’m a refinement.
everyone suddenly buzzes out, singing:

“when my fiction held its bit line-up,
many believed in the stitches…”

  
 

zombie enby

zombie enby grins a little grin

made of sweetbreads and sparklers—

the grin of a very slow slowworm,
the grin of a boozehound hungry for bourbon…

zir dead posture and zir dead swagger sway.

zir life’s little labors, they’ve lost their molars…

still ze smiles, opening zir polymath textbook

to a page coated in old lochia.

three eels come swimming from afar.
all the obtunded eels come to zir.

ze whistles out a ghostly gluestick tune,

a lonesome shanty headphoning forward…

mango-colored housemothers with leopard ligaments

ring around zir waxen melody.

the melody—afraid—falls seasick,

swallowed by a boatswain’s words:

“soon you will be where fog meets flotilla…”

it withdraws into itself, fades out as a failure.

but failure is counted sweetest
whose broken yield is a debunker of autonomy.

zombie enby understands this

and smiles still, zir cyan sun having set.

 

 

Matt Margo is the author of Blueberry Lemonade (Bottlecap Press) and When Empurpled: An Elegy (Pteron Press) as well as the editor of Zoomoozophone Review and experiential-experimental-literature.