SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Twelve
MARK DeCARTERET
The Year I Went without Looking Up Birds in My Bird Guide
I was led down to a delta to where all the lies I never told you were pooling up. And all the lies you never told me were sending out SOSs on this endless loop. We learned more than we needed to know from what we never heard, learned about. Now, a different kind of silence looks up from its soulful lapping to puppy-eye me. Hoping we can be pals. Slap together a Broadway play so off it fosters star-stuff or some silly thing. O, you Romeos-in-training, you've got many more miles to go before being asked to ceremoniously name them. Aim too far from Main. For all our thoughts have their limits. Always aspiring to song until hitting the air. What I've left to sound off against the hills, one-upping the stillness, are a chore now to listen to. Like those old, old recordings of afternoon rain. Another door being slammed. Yet look, how in the cool of the evening, the herons are a hundred-named reds as they tango in the reeds, lit from behind by the sun's die-hard memory.
The Year We Went without Writing Home
We entered from the left. Near where a gull lifted off. And a bluefish remained. Fin-flash after fin-flash. Dismissed by some flies. The red seaweed underneath it. And then we shifted. To where the sun unfolded in golden tiers. And thunder hid out till evening. At odds with what we thought was above us. Earlier, you smelled fuel. When we were in front of that restaurant. Wanted to tell someone. But then didn't know who. I was fine not. Instead, filtering out any mention of it. As well as where the stream met the sea. Looked and smelled like the color of lemony tea. Or where a lore was relocating the light. Or a feather rested. Till the wind stirred its lost dreams of flight. Or where a deer, yes, a deer, got a read on everything about us. Other than our laughter. Rounded off to these most unheard of. Slightly off notes.
The Year I Went Without a Hat
The sun was a white shoed orderly. With the right dose for everything. Was this white setting. Unfamiliar with this night I'd infested with dashes. The content of ashtrays. Shedding little light of my own.In a sense, slighting the sun. And anything unsightly in its eyes. One day, fashioning myself this old hero. Who had won an old war.Armed with an old sword. Another, this writer. Who'd throw words at the wall. Until it said something. I'd thought new for a moment. And lastly, an astronaut. Taking leave of one world. Only to fall for them again and again. But nothing I could sell the sun on. Teach it that lesson. It's had coming forever. So mostly, I sit in the shade. Always silently at odds. The rain always airing my wrongdoings. In slant after slant after slant. Where it saw to this.And to that. To outlasting the sun again.
Mark DeCarteret is from New Hampshire, USA. His poems have appeared in Agni, Boston Review, Chicago Review, The American Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, BlazeVOX, The Ekphrastic Review, Guesthouse, Hole in the Head Review, Map Literary, Meat for Tea, Nixes Mate Review, On the Seawall, Plume Literary Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal and Unbroken. His collections titled (If This Is the) New World was published by March Street Press in 2007, and his following two collections, For Lack of a Calling (2018) and lesser case (2021), have been published by Nixes Mate Books. He was Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Poet Laureate.
