Fleetings

By PHILIP NIKOLAYEV

*
Daily land for the craving landlubber
givest us this day,
art the way. Stars and Mars
inconsolable shine,
sway,
entwine
in the trite.
Salvage cars, salvage cars in the night.
Ignite.

*
They forgot on the café table
sorely unattended
behind the Bunn
O Matic brewer
embottlings of imperception
lazily overcast
and over the snow’s gorilla
stretched shadows of a further
lack of discernment
with its consequent self-diminishments
eventually happened upon
and duly disarranged
by the waiter who happened to be waiting
upon them that night at La Rosée’ed Rose
or whate’er it was
straight upon their departure
from the aforesaid estaminet.
The estival estaminet. Nord.
Nor did they return to pick them up.

*
A poetry not e’en for poets,
so abstruse e’en the poets,
e’en tho’ they are poets,
may fail to understand.

Winter spring summer fall,
wind rain snow sunshine hail,
first of all to forestall
hell, secondly to foretell.

Never again as such.
The thingness nor the thing.
How little is too much.
May fall November spring.

*
In the cloudy, cloudy if,
the subject of disbelief,
there’s a muddy, muddy yes,
marrow, bones and bloody mess.

Though no one deserves
destiny’s dense dust,
who opened us
this can of nerves?

*
This composition is not
about trying to stay sane
in a time of ever accelerating
whatevers
and crashing stock markets
I guess they are called.

It’s only about,
maybe, the shoulder
season of the mind.

They said, hah hah.
It is that Russian Russian thing he’s doing.
The metaphor, the sensibility.

Ah yes?

 

Philip Nikolayev has published several collections of poems, including Monkey Time and Letters from Aldenderry.

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Fleetings

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