Mark DuCharme

from Here, Which is Also a Place


"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself."
                        —Roland Barthes


The fat moon sweats
To zoom out window
Like a large, cartoonish ape
Under which we now break free


Being silver-tongued desperados
Licking goblets full of noise
In a language which absolves no one
Whom we do not adorn


If you parse a figment, would it
Please a flower’s effigy
& If you come back in an hour
Would you even recognize what you’d said


If you sought a language, would it bury
Silver chimpanzees
Lamaze study groups
Cartoonish golfers licking flecks of praise


In grace of the gangly, swaying trees
Which dignify the athletic
I only want what I want, returned—
Neither human nor adorned


***


When you are still, or yet disfigured
It does not bear an implicit
Reaction to rubies
Or cake, up the extremities, o populace


If but a tiny dose of it were thrown
Then I might sneeze
Unto your chainsaw, lout!


Thus, do I enjoy the privacy
Of wicked girls.


***


The book is upside down!
& Birds do so little
Have you heard them lately?
Have you read, without dreaming


Through the dark ends of lanes?
Until then, why prove anything
Little by little?
Why move, immured, ruined


Through the scorch of the visible?


***


If I were a river I would flow
Through your city, & nourish it. If I—


If I were a river
I’d be as polluted as love


& Fluently speak a second language.
If I could sing, I would be the sea,


But if I could flow, I would be unmapped
& Surround your environs ’til love breaks free.


***


To get through to the back
Side of the page
Until the air is bright


Is white, like all dead forms
All flaming hindrance, all stoppered material


Any fool knows that a flame
Cannot be held down


Yet what fools devour, a flame returns
One hundred times over, never
The same


Drowning in its own retractions,
Its reflections, reimagined cities,
Its faded restaurants & investigations,
A failed persistence never to return.


***


When the moon falls on my heat or trousers
So misdirected, so undone


I turned two pages instead of one
& Now the heat has gone against me—


***
***