SurVision Magazine

Sunset Boulevard


my only chance to be someone
was to be someone else

no doubt there is contradiction at the core
take this face for instance
I won't be using it anymore

oh I could have saved it
like all the other stand-ins
oiled and shined it up
like a harvest moon
but I didn't have the heart

instead I threw it
to the sweetest dog I knew
who devoured it ravenously

but I still have two eye sockets
two nose hollows and a mouth hole
buried in a mask

better than ashes and diamonds
thrown on a coffin
better than a sticky silicon smile

I must admit I didn't look like myself
the way they'd fixed me up
I wouldn't have recognized me
passing on the street





Monkeys Made Me Do It


whose reptile
becomes a bird overnight

whose horse from feathers grows
and has the wings to prove it

oh evolution
what's been sorrowfully missed

the three-footed sparrow
and the winged anteater

gone the way of the clairvoyant sloth
and the horned salmon

who has the pluck to unlock
the theater of loose ends

the twists and lurches of divergent
mutations so akin to poetry

that can't stand to just stick around
and simply chew the fat





Antimatter Twin


between yesterday's resolute conviction
and today's passionate correction
there's time enough for every decomposing
body to turn over in its grave

which means there is no bird
in any hand for long
only the worm of an idea
growing out of the synecdoche of a wing
any symbolic residue must take a number

the sentence hung over
the writer's head turns in its grammatical locks
the way purity gives ground to process
which is haunted by the missing subject

and what once seemed authentic
now appears hopelessly contrived
as the particle is sometimes a wave
so the judge may be a part time criminal
and the murderer an accomplished violinist
devoted father and loving son

"no last words" said the philosopher
as the ground shifted again under his feet
and his ghost particle his infamous
antimatter twin waited in the wings
for a surprise guest appearance





Charles Borkhuis is a poet, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. He has published nine collections; the most recent are Dead Ringer (BlazeVOX Books, 2016) and Finely Tuned Static (with paintings by John McCluskey; Lunar Chandelier, 2017). Among his other collections are Disappearing Act (Wave Books, 2014), Savoir-Fear (Spuyten Duyvil, 2003) and Alpha Ruins, which was selected by Fanny Howe as runner-up for the William Carlos Williams 2001 Book Award. He translated New Exercises from the French by Franck André Jamme (Wave Books, 2008). Two of his essays on innovative American poetry were recently published in separate anthologies Telling It Slant and We Who Love to Be Astonished (University of Alabama Press). He lives in New York City and has taught at Touro College and Hofstra University.