Exquisite Corpse - Issue 3
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Four Poems
by Ray DiPalma

 

Monopolis

Metaphysical geometry at Ranch Arouse
Wrong data in a limousine
Amusing the obliged and more of the most
Than the vogue could shift

It puts a nice personal sheen on the mayhem
Tabloid punchers addicted to aegis
Loot diplomacy and the biggest tits
Italian sprockets fronting the boardrooms

Flesh bolts and gridlock
Women in socks mismatch the herbs
Lotions of falsetto unison
Here's gush here's fifty bucks for pout

"Hey Wanda, scrape me some of that Lapin Nouvelle!”
Bennet wants a monolith for a lifestyle
Blitz palms his labors and winters in idle
Jotblots, portfolios, and brushstrokes

I used to be a young man now I'm molten
How much misery is tinsel in February
Repartee's chevalier probes his hooter

Where the universe starts its center


What Was In Parentheses Is Now In Brackets


There's human nature and there's human respect
And there's lobster ravioli for $25 a pound
Discretion puts you in the picture
Time passes and its versions become new evidence

The empty stoicism of the doctrinaire
Reformalizes the malice of its sophistry
Inadequate resentments form a power base
For new theories of self-reliance

For postscript read rupture
Public words get a grip on practice
It's the illusion of ethos
You've never heard this before?  No, never.

Expansive skepticism says what was inherent
Was merely inherited never mind about that
Formula is background illustrate from it
The obtrusive antagonisms of anything expansive

Cosmic limit is ample opportunity
Multiplicity is descriptive focus
A function of rational continuity

Nothing figurative shares the lineaments of truth


MCM99+

I am the father of my country and
Quote from my elaborate head-dress
Therefore therefore therefore therefore
The thinnest mountain air refreshes

I am the figure in the landscape
The shape in the distance the eventual
Uniqueness the sulking reproach to any
Minor transgression you might perpetrate

A history of suffocations and breathless
Urgency pizzicati of reasonableness to
Fill a definite place in the heart a pure
Distracted exaltation now I'm absent now

I'm congruent I am the intention of the same
Ideas that built the public buildings I am
The prod in the wink and the orator's resolve
My consolations instruct in 60 point Bookman

When revisionism is the general order of the day
I speak from entablature and what's exchanged
For meat and bread novelty is solution's disguise

The ardor of perspective always corrects my hazard


Memories of Oblivion

When I'm cold I have a tonic
And sleep on my ear
But today's almost caffeine free
And I feel nothing but heat

This is what is called a Stung und Drag
Period full of the rasp and tinkle
Of better late than never anything
Tangible overwhelmed by the black

And white of it something anything
A question asked the Sphinx
Is it smoky in bardo?  Well?  Barstow?
No, bardo!  Well, okay, what about Barstow too?

A tangled droop of terrors etwas aus dem
White Devil perhaps solicitous scruples
Never inclusive enough to be a portent rather
Just an accumulating measure of the ideal

And once disabused of praise and
The uncharted pleasures of same
The never nourished alternatives
Run out like a ghost story
 
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