Heir Apparent

Issue #28: October 2014

“Diary,” “In the Middle of the Day,” and “Papyrus Fail” | Daniel Poppick

Diary

1.

Gotaro did not move with-

out, he talked over

duck silence, a rental

sulk. The stove could

hurt but Gotaro was blurting

faith in an

algae he made with his

breathing. Here was the

valve, it poured forth a veil.

No one confused

ruination with sails so

Gotaro lit into the limb

of a window. Off in the city

a building breathed

2.

The lodestar cracked and

continued, it purchased

a juice. Herbs grew here

and here as if radio-

active. Gotaro’s love moved

with her sleeping and

dreamed of a lobster

replacing her “fever.”

Gotaro dreamed a dark

whirl underwater as if

drains emanated no faith

in the lunar; by her extension

his aunt had

gone dog. Truth

boxed in, bounced and

filled the spring

3.

It did not enjoy. Blood

flowed as if Florida. Gotaro

had only been once when he

smoked rock in a plastic

castle and perhaps for

the first time invented size.

It relayed into the

red of intention. He still

at this point had never heard

knives. Secreting one’s

voice is not a topical action.

He watched someone’s

tiara hum like a lion,

her teeth way beyond epistem-

ological. Vegetables flecked

the coast and Gotaro continued

its contract

4.

Gotaro would be surprised

by the weeping, but then

it was weeping that

invented him. He who

moves with a hazard

attached rests his eyelids

in concrete fog. Did the

neighborhood awaken

like a puppy’s face with every

intention Gotaro replaced?

I am not at liberty not

to say yes, but Gotaro’s

xylem is a fountain of no,

and when the grass seems least

tactful of objects he points to an iris,

bends down and picks it

5.

Gotaro, committed to an

asylum of song, had great

faith in arrows. Nothing

else understood his

corrections. A funeral is

a fuse box in this book’s

basement. No one could

leaf through the sun

and not feel welcome with

the punks underground,

but this is the nature of

reading without full know-

ledge of lockets. Gotaro’s

contains his father’s face. He

wears it around his neck

and all day, and sounds flow

through the loop

6.

A piano equals necrosis,

you can never bring it

anywhere in space but down. The

wind whistles through its

organs, hums. Gotaro is

composing a piece that

hates his hate, chastens

him sharper than sails

slit a harbor. He once

took a harpoon between

his teeth and dove under

the houseboats to see what

was living under his

instrument. He found a great

deal with his hands, and

it was soft and speaking

7.

Forward what, nimble ligament?

No one knows what you’re not

saying, this is the seventh

hour of iteration and

no one’s yet busted out

diamonds or praying.

My movements dark and

plenty. The clock strikes,

time for Gotaro to

position his skin in relation

to his friends the stones

and rabbits—their narrows

pulsing out like boomerangs

on the poor, informed—

but Gotaro can always

make other friends. He

bends in the direction

8.

Gotaro is a kind of second-

century friend, riveted

less by the electronics than the

electronics. Steep censure,

was the surface an intro-

duction to day’s satellite?

I marked an orbit as it

vacated my pockets, little

ruses someone else

delights in when the

point from a to b

proves discursive as a

bolt. Gotaro plays from

here to there, his fur

pricked on the back of something

else’s neck. It moved,

I found it moving

9.

The cacti crumbles between

our tongues, fleet blood

about to get extremely observed.

He shades his eyes and

takes a slug of mirage,

it conceptually cools

him. Perhaps he was

wrong to think a body

could reach him. All he

ever wanted was to

sail across land as if

belief were cut from

each pore as a choice. What

he didn’t realize was

faith isn’t a spigot, it’s a noise

10.

Thus I am inwardly my police.

I know not where a fly

goes in its pride. Dream in

which a medium friend

drives past me waving in a

roundabout cracks open, not even

enough to jam one’s foot into

the other room. Gotaro’s is always

in the door, indeed his

feet are not so much

inside them as around.

He walks on his own

two surfaces and

directs traffic in his sleep,

screaming 美は真実,

真実の美しさです at SUVs

11.

Gotaro would rather chill

his face against the frozen

concrete for the rest of

the afternoon than go back

to work but he realizes

too that frost is its own labor,

and unlike the one Gotaro

does for a living this

one’s adhesive

crystal licking the outer

edges of his frame. The

whistle blows, black notes

pour forth. Gotaro peels

himself off the ground

in gradations. He will remember

each as a color on

the flip side of a cut

12.

Someone’s knocking on his

skin like it’s an institution.

Draft trickling through his

passageways to meet white

cells. I await your imitation.

Blasted on neon spleen,

felt the opulence implied

in patching up my finest shirt

sewn to another emper-

or. In this sense the needle

frees a present tense

of both legs, lion

gnaws on one like bubble gum

and punctures day’s doorknob.

The brass bleeds

In the Middle of the Day

1.

That’s north the rain raineth

In my wall

I install fixtures am a great sail

Whatever was soaked in my door’s lead gild remained

Bathed in fumes at the time

The clock bloomed in the fuse

I can feel it swallow

At the time I sang an attic to itself its rafters issued forth a roof

As foxes exit a headlit road by none it was imperial

No one can fuck a glass of water except obviously Blake

I am able to speak to him in the length of mirror

Hosts address me during lulls in talk only for the sake of others

At that the room plummets

Can your actions grow vines

Enough to catch a little hook of solar complication

You will come around

May I be you and we in sorrow

I cannot speak for it but dream a number of bright red arrows

Three levels emerged in the wood of my hand one the color of a sphere

The other two were jewels with shields

Black essentially depending on the day

Creating one’s man is to form his image

In this state he will serve as emblem for the spirit with which he corresponds

Every word that leaves me comes from the mouth of God

My heart remains in the movies

One stands to greet them in the dark

My friends once left their window cracked for months while heat leaked up

This flash is what it’s like to lie crying to the movies

This time I’m not going to use them as stilts

No one begins to imagine throats

These are no figment I dare you to sing with them

The signal is greatest close to the shore

By these lakes some people with money named after their departed children

They are absolutely human

I keep arriving at that word

In this place where giving and taking feel precisely the same

Blake was frequently inside

Making the sound of a piano making love to television

I remain optimistic for palms and plumes mounted on the edge of space

But butterflies peel into the square with them and without

Deer are coughing green through the hollow

Glad they’re a gland

Is the dotted line that runs between them optical or magnet

I was glad when your letter came

And more so when it opened

It’s personal if it crawls on everyone’s skin

The feeling should be preserved like a monument and in many cases is

I am without question very much in love

In that case home is at the mouth

A transparent cave of arrows

The storm flat and electric

A number are good with its kingdom

For peace I mean we could cut them there and leave them only with horses

Their characters reversible with song

They absolutely are

All people seem good until you hear them work

2.

The power passes between sentry and the gate she keeps

No one should fuck with that arrangement

As a mirror in a hallway holds whatever visage passes through its limbs

In the sunburn hours

Spines aloft in gravity dictate the position

Of a dragnet

Its spectacles walls

Before their eyes so hearts stay indoor voices

Streaming down the panes

Redder than an exit

So would you sue me for feeling terror a poorly stitched disguise

Christ is in the pyramids tonight

Smellin’ like a window

And pockets a crystal coin within those sides

But we know where it hides and the fountain it ought to be thrown into

Something in the middle distance sweats

No one will touch me as it comes forward

No one subjects the mirror to hurt it doesn’t deserve

Mostly it poses questions

Too didactic for a library it wonders how to feel

Is it the skeleton of Westminster Abbey

Raw nerve cell in the spine of the dead who have

Passed into its mouth

There are a number of eruptions

But never a shortage of homes

Someone deserves to kiss your sentences

A book of common prayer collecting bird heads for its fur

Everything beyond the skull is the last frontier

So the mirror is an open book

After all

And you are its doctor

It is the starlight with you

Through wind and rain it is contagion

We only own faces after all

Dulcet stage

And if wings are physical we’ll only owe these time

The muscle is no informant but full of lace and information

Sometimes all in one

Autumn slips into shrapnel

A face appears to show the costume its negative

Little streams ran down to my arms

I felt the machines of my lips and eyes were one with tightnesses in chests

I threw a stone it landed

Honey in the decibels

I am stamped with your kiss

And you held the water glass with a little extra violence

So it might never bear against the table

And feel gravity’s mark in weeping

The lady cannot bear to hear us speak

But I know she will come morning

Aims sharpened

She shifts into flesh so song can be preserved

Data written in her favor a spider runs along

Her wrist

And arrests you in her account

Under lamplight washed in your sound

Papyrus Fail

The body inflates a small revolt

As it rests for its return.

Sound carries well in damp weather, as do ferns through skin,

And “a tree is a print-out of its history with space”

Provided for mutation

Which the poet tells us flowers and people

Are almost never favorable to the organism

At hand. I wonder if swans count.

To bear the stain of involvement

Relentlessly as a jigsaw puzzle; I don’t want

You to see me see you be fire.

All of my actions are toys at the podium, even

When sailors strike. A spade queen,

That’s a good example of what it feels

Like to die inside those numbers. One slits

The end of autumn open and what does she find?

One, and that has some bearing on us meeting here

Tonight when the alphabet’s twilight bangs

On a classical procedure towards weeping.

Let me demonstrate by reading

A few scenes out of my face: metal and Elizabeth have many

Children, but metal meets a man

Inside years. How could this happen?

Well for one, what got into it was sleep,

Blocks of, shocks blown

Out of the belt moving seconds

Through the factory exploding hours into others.

Thriftless units,

Let them remain for the tête-à-tête.

For another, I’m filing them to a sharp point as we speak

But the inspection is already over. It concludes there is a hole,

Income leaking patients, and the flow’s

Not cold if you spread them into your hands and rub friction

Until it loves you in return. This is an irresponsible poem

Because I think I can reasonably assume

Even filled with a fluid

You would not activate it under the present dome.

One cannot simply call

A ghost on the telephone. Lead poet, what was it

You had meant to plagiarize off breath

When you opened the furnace

And slipped this little letter inside? Who else would have read?

The police are increasingly after my friends, but

What about the nouns departing? Where’s one to plant

These lost puppets? I fall

Asleep each night with little faith you want to reveal,

And that particular ember of lack

Does not contain enough fuel to heat even this small room.

Nothing goads its borders, so what good could red do now

Unless suffused with what I hope and imagine

Might be your tactile alarm?

It’s not often you get to really feel dominions clapping

But what you feel right now

Is the back of your own neck, not mine,

And at least this month both of us are living therein.

While we’re here, do you think you could lend

Me the brisk hammer that an heirloom

Is?

Now nails, now gentle force, now photos hung

On walls. In the future

Thought will be extracted from our eyes like a roll of film, negative

Spilling its shrill sequence

In braids to ape the state’s

Novel way of chastising any speech remaining

By repeating it in the exact same voice

And then dubbing it over a video of a mouse cleaning its ears with real pathos

But cartoon eyes, a plausible direction

For where we might go next in imagining the soul

Via the arms. It’s not punishment, just

How maps drink a system. Remember how you once

Kissed a map

And it was cool and bottomless? I sometimes forget men and women

Even have legs but something

Operatic out there

Reminds. It enters

When I’m not that far in the grieving

Largely because each cube of air

Ends with a cube of its larger organization; try

As you might we do not have the vocabulary to glow the way

Away from me, but I hope you believe me

When I say I mean harm. Truth’s threat

Is several friends raking laughter up

To store it in black plastic bags, burning it with poison ivy,

Then picking up the phone only to breathe all

Over the dial tone. So many calls

I keep forgetting to insert letters (in the traditional sense of the word)

Like lava, a son in the flickering sea,

Forgets to knock on the water’s surface

Before it says hello to a temperature. Something smells fishy

Here but only to the eye. I know you less

In collaboration, like a mower

Blocking day as fast as day trembles

By any other name. Inside

A disastrous future awaits

Though beautiful in its process. Of courage

All I know to say is

Night is longer than the heart

In certain of its variations, namely

The one beaming between our faces.

Of course water is an emotional experience, you wouldn’t

Want to run through it protected.

I’ve known those people

And they were all landscapes

Versus your shape, they have a kind of session in woods

As a smattering of aspens

Shares a single root system, the mountains in a view

Revolve around one blazing core so hilarious with goo

That to call it metallic is like I mean excuse me?

No one wants to eat

Off of that thing with a collection of glands

To make holy each day. The river says “huh,” and I have to disagree,

If not with the inflection

Then the implicit question’s size

Looming in its frog-flecked filigree. Last night passed,

The water now green. My first breath this morning an analog

For the eye’s

Entanglement with transparency—so the river’s not

Shrugging, it’s beginning to say “Hamlet,”

Muffled in the opening rain. There’s danger in inflection.

Father of emblems

Lead me to some stuff by the river

If you flash on the surface in several shades, if you are

Or live in its surface and small waves.

Five years ago I drove along the other bank

And thought about “orchard” versus “vineyard,”

Now I am older, don’t think in words,

And it still gallops

Down the banks like fuck. The poet also

Gives off speed, rate at which we become

Nurses for each. I stand there in the waiting

And finally glide to the fridge

Which is here for a visit and itself

Bright as a hospital. Must be all the fumigants.

The power reminds that plants are not kingmakers,

A politics ought not be wielded

For aesthetic sheen alone,

Fastening flowers to a gun of infinite referents. It’s dark in there,

I find my cell while rooting inside, open it and say

Come home, but the receiver is already there.

This is another reason for teeth,

The forehead

Can only chew through so many surge protectors.

Someday I’ll proceed

With that action with evidence. I need

To share something at you, and it’s what

You do with them: people get Europe pulled

Out of their fingernails, enter a diamond,

And what do we find? I find Elizabeth

And she is saying. They

Find a centipede eating a reader. You find an opinion

Pulsing with silence there where light throws hate at a rainbow

But the question remains

Did it heal you with sound?

‘Cause solitude is green and unavailing

And speech is a station through which round weeds blow.

Even I am approaching your throat.