Three Poems
By Donari Braxton.
Reel Change
A lot of things in view right now
are no longer there. Fuck all, we
say, we’ve got to be;
we too’ve got to stutter
the angle!
But where do we start:
The trick, well,
suggests a hologram but
isn’t; a shield self-projecting chinks
in the armor of a natural moving-picture
show isn’t, is it?
Growth fits, Choggys
told me, a lousy nativity—Wise-
guys from Newark told him so.
What I remember,
of two shadows
of the trunk,
a pipedream and the drinking years
dribbling on two or three countable fingers,
the would-be dark of a tree branch already
invisible behind its heavier body
was very sad to see.
So the blind spot with bullet holes
was behind the things in bloom,
I asked Choggys West? Though even when
I’ll look right at them he’s weeping
words of his passing, piss scents, chip shades under a fog-
light in motion. “What’s the matta you gotta monkey-
see-monkey-do?” He’d say, though with skin
painted again by the daylight already,
he reassures me by repeating “nothing
you haven’t already seen.”
Untitled 2007 No.2
In the dead of night I wake up sometimes
to a right thumb who’s watching its sisters;
they’re trumpeting an invisible four-keyed brass horn and
pinkying the pitches
sleepwalkers can’t hear.
Piano fingers
winkling a ballet of synchronized swimmers
making tiny waves in the lightless water—nothing feels
like bedrooms whose blinds hate their own impairment.
Envy what’s tone-deaf, and where the shutters are scales of an alligator’s back, constant breathing makes pockets of constant hyaline,
rucking the world into a bubble snow-globe,
nothing ever bothering
to know its place.
Untitled 2007 No.8
The very gist of nothing
is slightly creeping up my spine,
buttering the bone
curves till they’re eel-like, a salutation: Can you
backstroke so far?
It waits until I can in order
with the point of its skink tongue to
lick off the butter.
(A list of the following: Needs,
only the dried-out Kalashnikov,
a heartsick cancer,
the malaprop shoreline
of some typified Martian beach; To-do’s,
learn swimming).
You and I, we were at that point;
cocooned peoples,
the skin was
a flytrap of lintball walls and everything it touched
like beaver’s wood under the flow of water rushing to waste it away into the future,
so it’s not too often survived.
Nothing was kind of hinting at it.
An absence of suggestion pointing: Right
under your nose, don’t move a finger!
But the thing
about evolution,
you are never where and you are
never where
the one who could possibly tell you—
still waiting on the three of us now,
silently, tirelessly—where
in one, final breath.
These three poems are from the forthcoming (III, Or) The World is Seldom Thing. Author pic by Andrew Ellis.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Donari Braxton is the author of numerous works of fiction, poetry, theatre, and cross-genre works; his second poetry collection titled, (III, Or) The world is Seldom Thing, will be released in 2009, and dates and figures on the release of his second collection of short stories are forthcoming. Presently he is finishing a novel and continues to contribute to various art, fashion and design publications based in L.A. and in New York City, where he currently lives.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Saturday, September 13th, 2008.
