Best Specimen Poems
Into what wisp of cloud or clod did my poem flee?
Into what minuscular pinch of diaphanous, free-floating empyreal, stratospheric air did my figurative furled parchment disappear?
Where are those poignant yet comic, yet weird and allusive and furtive and outrageous and oddly touching and haunting and charming and outlandish and wonderfully lame words that I wrote?
Why did I not, as I wilt with this, assay to make some few or sundry copies of them?
Why did not my cursor flick and flit over them, and my highlighter underscore and envelop them in its oddly circumvallatory way?
Why did I not behave upon these things, to actuate them, to do my bidding-
The only way I might have safeguarded and given due survival to these, my "children"? Children of an oddly misshapen, half-formed sort, but lovable all the same: Loved with the authorial yet kindly and parental love of the writer,
The poet, the author...
They are missing, they are gone-and who but I, in my callow, thoughtless reckless irresponsibility; who but I mourns them?
I, who unwittingly made their death happen?
(Yet, 'twasn't another, other than me, another agency, also blameworthy and complicit in these "deaths" and disappearances? In these inverse deletions and erasures? Wasn't some draconian governing body passing equally draconian and abstruse, unknown and unknowable, laws...were they not also to blame?
Where is the justice and the mercy and the forgiveness and the pity for the ignorant? For, in this case, myself? I, who almost was a victim, myself?)
Okay friends now let's just see
Do I have weaknesses of my own?
Nope, after careful investigation
I find I'm just perfect to the bone
A doggone stunning specimen
Of a *****sapien supreme
With bulging muscles everywhere
My tummy is tight and lean
So muscle bound, can't even bend
To tie my oversized shoes
Haven't seen some parts of my body
Since ninety-sixty-two
What's my secret you may ask
To my Greek Adonis form?
I chew on nuts and alfalfa grass
Celery and cobs of corn
Not your cup of tea you say?
So keep up your over stuffed ways
Like the famous Goodyear blimp
You'll go drifting off in the haze!
© Jack Ellison 2013
Hey look at me, quite a treat you will see
A body so fine and it's all mine, but ain't free
Demand big dollars
Want a piece? just holler
However, a bank loan may be needed
They did not build it around him; they built him inside of it.
Poured like liquid consciousness into a mold of absolute geometry,
he hardened in a silence that drank his screams before they could form.
First came the decay: fear shivering in the marrow,
then the long drought of loneliness where memories thinned into ghosts.
Rage returned—a magma-flare against unseen planes—until the fire
settled into the grey dust of despair. He became a statue in a museum of one.
Time lost meaning until a primal itch moved his hands.
Cartographers of a featureless world, they felt for a flaw, a joint, a lie.
Finding none, a single brittle fingernail dragged a nerve-jangle
across the dark. And with it—a wound.
A pinprick of light pierced the void, a shard of an impossible star.
His heart sputtered and roared. Fingers became talons,
tearing at the wall until an imperfect mouth of light revealed the truth.
Not earth, but an architecture of spun starlight and frozen mist.
Towers floated over luminous clouds, traversed by beings of pure light.
And there sat his cube: a mote of dust on a crystalline shelf,
one among a million black cells in a honeycomb of suspended souls.
The air in his lungs turned to glass. This was no escape,
but the unveiling of the true prison. He was a specimen on display.
The darkness had been a mercy; this unattainable heaven was the torture.
He launched his body—a ram of bone against eternity—but the wall
was a god that did not listen. Slumped against the scratch marks,
he watched the uncaring city drift by. Finally, he understood
the difference between being trapped in the dark and being trapped by the light.
SPECIMEN SPECULATIONS
obviously
spontaneous
delicate
interpretatIons
initiated
emphatic
interpreted
empirical
findings
of
manifold
motivations
subjective
but
outwardly
visible
recognisable
displays
in
border-line
studies
of
blurred
exceptional
interactions
of
catalogued
formulations