SurVision Magazine
An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Eleven
JAMES GRABILL
Song Undone
You may already be a pungent tropical breeze
the colors of an Amazonian parrot.
You may be uranium executrix for the grievously mindful.
You may already be a moth inventing your own form
of transformation, or believe nothing
much needs to be said about dying,
For the cells of the wildest grasses will speak, call it,
with human cells in interspecies sense,
before standing alive with solidarity.
No snow-white absentee society glistens within sight
while heavy water burns out of history.
No aboriginal incendiary clock claws apart the familiar
exotic emptiness and fullness in being alive
that co-evolves, but slowly enough to not be missed
in an eyelash pulse or a mayfly's slight digestion.
Without gas in your cosmic cylinders for hours on the road,
would your loaf even conform with shape?
Would we know what was on Chaplin's Alaskan table?
The untelling handiwork of your own terse regret without rock
of the coast over your shark sloughs swimming
makes dark benedictions for strains of Intelligentsia.
But who wants to risk sabotage of our known antigravitational
treble up-hammered into high rat-squeal urgency
before the spectacle of the greater osmotic undone?
The brain proves it is an extraordinary stringed instrument
that pursues a medium of echo-location in reverse,
liberating day from automated xylophone backdrops.
For no coal cat's dark skulk comes bearing embryonic depths
of communal joy. No amniotic sways of unfound
fractions must breed in cavernous caresses
past the truck-wrecked milks in prayerful craving.
For waking-sleep positions the self in two locations
at once, upon the fluid planetary balance
and rigorous nerve in contemplation,
for a view standing apart from the world.
Sentences Tied to a Tree
Marines charge up on shore in the spectacle of humiliating angry fathers.
Blank-slate fertility sky-rockets following the concert of sky-burned coal.
Along the edge of mercy, the ocean of beings is out erasing comparisons,
as the blistering cave-wall instant draws the eye to the vanishing point.
Stallion rivers that pour through the sky appear ready to fall on anyone.
Roman numeral countdowns continue to march upon medieval villages.
The King's English may have consoled kindly guards at the ancestral gates,
but what's so good about waking if it doesn't build its roads to dreamtime?
Sweeps of intent roll in waves only so far before causing national borders.
Halibut swim on their single wing past jokers and exotic foreign queens.
Where the toddler's familial spoon will be filled one second, empty the next,
disproven Western assumptions that cannot be retrofit must be scrapped.
Will materialists never tire of dressing up in ever more African diamonds?
Dick the Bruiser sure could transfix the Sheik with a sweaty hammerlock.
Soundtracks that scar childhood recall end up a few remnants of identity.
If it weren't for the human head, wouldn't everyone have more of a clue?
Suddenly the small toddler's lunch spoon is being used to beat the drum.
Transcendence flies over on vanishing wings where the Earth turns green.
James Grabill is from Portland,
Oregon. His poems appear in Calibanonline, Unlikely Stories,
Terrainonline, The Decadent Review, SurVision, etc. The most recent of
his poetry collections are Branches
Shaken by Light, Reverberations of the Genome (Cyberwit,
India, 2020 and 2021), and Eye of
the Spiral (UnCollected P, 2022).
