#david roderick

[karma--police]

Self-Portrait as David Lynch

By David Roderick

I wear a flower in my lapel. I like the sweetness of its lie in my nose. A carnation, the fool’s flower,

its heart a wilting empire. In late-night editing sessions, I imagine I’m planting flowers

in the sockets of eyes. Whatever helps me reach our rigor mortis, bound behind the wheel,

a little Bowie on the radio, maybe, at six frames per second, headlights plowing the dark’s divided road.

Cities grow to calcified castles. Fish groom the coral brains anchored in a tank’s purple volume.

I love the scratch of celluloid and a low-register noise, the hair of heat burning in a lit bulb.

Sometimes I swap my carnation for an orchid or rose. On-screen, there’s every hint

a man-child built the night. I read it once, by flashlight, as a kid— that Sleep and Death are brothers,

and they send our dreams through two gates, one made of horn, for the true dreams, and one made of tusk, for the false.

[llovelymoonn]

david roderick the americans: "running brush"

kofi

[fluttering-slips]

Crocuses        

After nearly hacking them down

while mowing my back lawn,

I think of Rimbaud aroused

by their purples and greens

as they spiked between

the stones of the Rue de Buci,

barbarous among the modernity. David Roderick

[etourdit]

Message for Jim in Syria [Fall fell wind-wise]

Fall fell wind-wise today— / trembles of dried lilac stalks, dead

[snitnation]

But we want to see the inmate’s face, the tattoo under his eye that meant he’d killed someone: the ink outline of a teardrop

State Lines: A poem by Michelle Brittan Rosado | Datebook

[snitnation]

with ragged beats & the beats are too beat to live so the graves push out with hands that cannot touch the makers of light & the sun flames down through the roofs & the roots that slide to one side & the whistlin’ fires of the cops...

State Lines: California poetry: ‘Almost Livin’ Almost Dyin’ ’ - San Francisco Chronicle

[seaanimalonland]

Faithful See Virgin Mary in Office Window  | David Roderick

In flowerbeds we crowd, some praying, some bowing as the world, minute as it is, stays in motion: box stores doing business, fast food joints, and above us a crow, secular bird, lighting on a lamppost while we take pictures or cry as if we could live forever in this gloried surround, gazing up at the window holding her bleared hair, her mouth that is a frenzy of trapped pollen or dust, eyes like smooth shells that make us forget what fertilized the flowers at our feet, bulbs fortified with potash or bone meal, dried blood, which reminds me of the Annunziata I saw in Italy, painted by those who thought color itself was divine: crushed shell, coral and ash, pigments mixed with egg in a man’s mouth, and I worry about standing too close to the believers, I who rubberneck and lie, do I stand too close to the woman at least six months along with her own child, waving a sonogram with a faint infant shape inside, an image scratched by waves: light squandered here, dilated there, compressed oil and dust as every body contains its atlas of salt, kiss-worn, and always some bud dreamed in springtime, and though I’m a yarner and one for whom doubt is a clutched root, I can’t yet walk to my car, standing here wondering if after His birth the virgin girl saw the rest of her life would be nothing but a way to talk about that morning: gold nearly blinding, herdsmen and kings, and with its broad warm tongue a cow licking the afterbirth from the hay. David Roderick, ‘Faithful See Virgin Mary in Office Window’ published here.

via saint-zissou

[frozenseawithin]

Colony

First the sea came true and then the land because the bones of their followers found hard earth, foothold and roothold, pine-pitch stains on their clothes. Clouds memorized them and moved on, cool shadows pulled by a pagan wind. Because every false doctrine stingeth like a viper, they built a gun-port and fort, a row of lathed pews, and when phlegm rattled in their preacher’s chest, they waited for another messenger, someone to write their names with a seagull’s wing. Why did they own this silence? What led them to this far place where all the wrong animals lived? Beneath the snow there were brambles and beneath the brambles clay, the hardest layer they named for the English king. Bareboned winters. Drenched hair. Coins in the mouth of a fish. All they wanted was a flawless green, a sky that smelled like rain, something more sacred than a rabbit pelt nailed to a tree. -

-David Roderick