SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Eight
CHARLES BORKHUIS
Tensile Strength
deeply embedded in road tongue
I give you the bumpy night on a silver spoon
what more can a grace note do
but run the next thought into ground-sparks
lipstick traces ooze circles 'round a wound
graffiti breath across the galaxy
makes your face shine in my spitball light
every empty socket is another pool shark's pocket
let's enter the great game and let winter flakes
fly off us like a fabulous new disease
don't lose me to a momentary backfire
I'm not your second-storey man
anonymous masked bandit trying to steal
a little fresh air from an unused planet
sure I'm scared to stare past the nothing hour
my mind loses its train its compartmentalized
brain and rolls into sky-crackling thunder
my shadow burned into a brick wall
my body electric ignites photons underfoot
no doubt you'll pick me out of a lineup
when my fever flashes poetic license
and darkness unloads its candles
I entered you from the other side of the milky way
suffice it to say I've grown light years older
but my bones can still manage a slow watusi
just to let you know it's me take a chance
on the shine off these wilting subway roses
give me a sign and I'm halfway there
Footnote
my skywriter's hand has stopped
mid-sentence
appalled by the prospect of pushing more life
through the point of a pen
a vagrant stole the pennies off my eyes
and I awoke under the hollow of a hanging moon
holes in my head voices in my hands
invisible fingers began to tinkle an old tune
neck burns footprints in the mud
don't ask where I've been
who's this someone listening in
that's bugged my recalcitrant brain
my feverish little twirl of a heart
dancing on the head of a pin
someone wound me up and left me wandering
incognito down dark city streets
mindlessly humming a nameless little ditty
learned at my mother's knee
I was found nursing at the tit of the discontinuous
that disarming ten-foot layer cake
some euphemistically call
a sentimental education
little wonder I am humiliated
for reasons I don't understand
the groundhog digging his hole
in the formless clouds
the baroque angels giggling
above the closing slit of my eye
like everything else perverse and profound
my little terrors started in childhood
the soldier posted at my closet door
fell asleep in the toybox
and a giant praying mantis hovered over my bed
she apologized profusely
before devouring me starting with the head
so much for nature studies
I was later sentenced to squeeze
cursive letters through a narrow tunnel
stay inside the horizontal highway
recite poems to the beat of a stick
I threw upon my mirror image
and spasmed epileptic in the autumn leaves
that was around the time mother married god
and father went to hell in a handbasket
everything happens for a reason
dogs must learn to poop outside the apartment
you must learn not to lose
your train of thought
but inspire students to bolder up another hill
keep writing poems despite discouraging parents
and the job that keeps rolling
back down the hill
auspicious beginning peeking through
the loopholes of an unexamined life
courage will find you
or not
consider the million to one shot
that made you you
and not another well-adjusted inchworm
maneuvering his career ever forward
despite the abyss below each step
singing slightly off key
my wrist was placed upon a table
where rhizomes stretch under thin skin
each vein seeks a way through
its grammatical tissue
there are fifteen letters in my name
I walk with a limp and nod to strangers in passing
how is it on planet earth
laid flat so one may walk
toward the receding horizon that turns forever
'round the bend
so many provisional paths hang
just out of reach
while my finger lingers
tracing spiral galaxies in a sandbox
the sun's light takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds
to arrive but by that time
the solar sphere may have disappeared
while we were bathing in its warmth
one rides the hills on breath alone
strapped to a wave of talking flames
that singe the sky and fall back to earth
so be it each moment
a possible peek
into the shadow's bending light
one follows a line of aristotelian logic
up and down obscure mountain tops
the foliage dense and unforgiving
the predators scouring the forest for new prey
still there's something intoxicating
about the cruel beauty of a stone
something inhuman about humanity
the robot within waiting for its chance
the night rolls breezeward and we float
past the fruit of our divided selves
hanging from a naked tree
we know too much
to settle for not knowing
we must torture the facts to finally
confess... confess
their painful mathematical uncertainties
we must have gotten it wrong
there's no place for infinity
in our elegant equations
back to the blackboard
it's all written in binary code somewhere
zero or one live or die relish or no relish
scientists can't remain wriggling
like a worm on the end on a hook
but when we speak of atoms
poetic images inevitably do the talking
words crack a whip and we leap
tiger through a flaming hoop
from center to periphery and back
from infinity to an infinitesimal twist
on something that wiggles away
while inching forward
inhabiting many haunts at the same time
love followed by an asterisk
footnote to an unwritten book
someone's heart rising off a cement puddle
time to drop that body of glass
and explode the laughing mirror's either or
sometimes it requires the greatest effort
to find a place in which
it takes no effort at all
to do the most difficult thing
Charles Borkhuis is a poet, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. He lives in New York City and has taught at Touro College and Hofstra University. 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 Acts (Chax Press, 2014), Savoir-Fear (Spuyten Duyvil, 2003), and Alpha Ruins (Bucknell University Press, 2000), which was selected by Fanny Howe as runner-up for the William Carlos Williams 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).
