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Best Poems Written by Dort James

Below are the all-time best Dort James poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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It Could Be Would

she was a salamander of the sun
an enraptured reptile of the stars
dancing with the other campfire lizards
in the asphalt murrain
in the technomarshes
in the hookah parking lots
and mildewed shopping malls
on the internet
amongst the programmer punks
and hacker geeks
the tweeting tools
the facebook fools
sashaying through cyberspace

and in all the common places
where human hearts are liquid nitrogen
her belly is sparidged and maplemarvelous
the taut black knit tubetop
stretched acrylic over tantalum breasts
the cerise cutoffs born
broadbelted and blithely
clenching her pomegranate cheeks
piebald with sweet sweat
appaloosan with her own sweet waters
because a culture summer is coming
in
in Coddles Harbour and Port Hilford
in Manchester and Fox Island
a magnetic renaissance
coming in  ike a lion
like a lizard loaded indigo
and heat desperate
and as he stood
and watched
"all states, all princes I."
and as she moved and sang he spoke
"Love.
There is no 'love'."
"It is true.  It is true."

I cannot clutch the tongue
of bones commonwealth any more
nor catch any human kingdom here
any tenderness no longer
moats between us
it is occupied
shocked
by the ordinary
the commonplace
by the electrical
but
still
I am mad ensieged
with her

Details | Dort James Poem

Muffler Days -- For Ld, Just In Case She Is Looking

you are in				                                                                your car
you’re						                 Mrs Albert Camus
taking							               that last
train ride he never	                                                                                                     took
an envelope	                                                                             steering about your
jiggering fingers						    hesitant scared
of being committed						            to the mail
you’re the muffler guy			                         driving your mudmade
stationwagon					                   with backbigend
dragging						               like a pensionedoff
bellydancer’s rump				              with rhinestone shale of cirro
cumulus dustcloud dirt				 roads selling wormy turnips
to						             anyone who’ll listen
mouthing					               mail chute an abyss a sound
a leap of faith			                              an absurd essay for meaning
so	                                                                                                                   u turn
& turn again about &	                                                                           she’s gone
surely as if it were she                                                      lost to some random automobile
and not you					                     to the attempt

Details | Dort James Poem

Paradise Lost Or Enterprise: the Bus Ride, the Vessel -- Itemized


caught short singly
one rainwrote morning in hyannisport
when snows a science
over iceroof and snowfloor beachsand and
eastersundaysun a milton shadow opportunity
opposite sleeping young and russetrocket cool
in ferriswheels of rococo chestnut hair
shortblack pleatedcotton skirt carouseling round creamcoffee legs
swinburne stretched in desert stockings slightly spread
hands lapclasped
nose artdeccoerect eyes razed marble monuments lips
just lips
chinachin touching down on a fire
work whitesilk blouse no ruffles
a plainsong of anti flesh skinquisitive
toes still and borne just like ejaculated popcorn
jacket buttered lemonleather
shoes pumps patented starbust bright
bag royal with umberous umbrella tossed
off about her
cottoncandybreasts roughly rippled by the rucked road to
go tunneling
not traveling
descartes launched in
parting
only a starspangledbanner thought
old Lucy Gray reserected
equated
transcribed for solitude
for nine hours bad road

Details | Dort James Poem

Egg At the Odd of Night

outside
inventoried oval-stoned
cathedrals appealing
chiming crimes of passion
woke citronella
fog
hung in cement-hamocked snowdrifts
cloaked slow on slick-stained windowsides
tenement sheets
with the pomegranate notes
of rhythms unrhymed
   while all the uptown laundromarts
rising up
from insomniac-scrambled sidewalks
corked-copper moon tumbling earthward
like a sweet
sweatshredded pennants
   of sun-saliva silks on rain-dribbled cotton
then
cherry-flat footsteps lust-percussive
under shamble-wracked sills
pause and then pass on
momentarily appeased in time by
blued bars on fly-fouled panes
bell tower-balanced above
   taverns abutting back alleyways of
need
by fireplace mantle-pieced nooses
of nylonic shirts and poly slacks
and musts dusted-down
past stockinged-lidded faux plastic lampshades
passed on past magnolia movements
of fingertips on muscle surfaces
   in-side
defoliate-spun spinnakered islands
chocked choked
in passing lynched adhesion
ignoring nicotine-papered stripteasing walls
or scotch-spat skirtings
creeping pedestal for
a moulded tangerine ceiling stuccoed into sudden mute
breath
rinsed down a night-scented-taking-stock
split-mirrored motel door
they go lunging over greasy chapels of
grit-grained
breakfast jasmine-tea-stained mock vinyl rugs
squeaking cot now like some
concreted river bed's of slump
of stun-spurned wants broken down
consciousness half-considered
stirring

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Parallel Conjunction

this can not be
you must not come together
align
straight line of other wise

She said

and I concur

and how
how could he hold her
when stoopdom stands in que for her
and does not suspect
that He was listening
hearing her
softly speaking evensongs
on the seat beside

almost sleeping
driving home

Details | Dort James Poem

Anti-Physic 5: Bradburying

"When I stand with this silence
between us all, we are still never here --
and then I move and your whole world
shifts, and there you are.  We were."
                                              -- Tom Mars

and he had told her that he loved her, out here
between the valley of the shadow of dead twin
suns and the petrified web of the tinfoil
rocketship's silver scaffold, here, with the
wind snapping into the cult and bolt of them
and they were lead, precious pewter parachuted
across the little lakes of mercury like so many
silvered fishes smeared on sound   Going
their own separate ways together   The
wind weaved a momentary pyramid of sometimes over
them   They breathed like partime pharaohs
disfigured as so many lovely paradoxes, holding
back the frenchblue gaseous
night with the infamous electric lights of
there own selfish suckled selves, especially
right here in this nubended yellow room of
a world, jaundiced by the naked raw bulbs
of stars and the disappointment of crushed
cigarette lives   A kind of Autumn came for them and
the cadmium ground was lost leaves of foreign sands, out
here between the last light and their starship,
their thoughts caterwauling into
the limestone dusk of an alien world's
amphitheatre of the sensual, licked in its
familiar percussions, she had walked laughing
away.

Details | Dort James Poem

Tole Boof

on confessional summer streets of city
the heat scums in like a churlish treacle
in back of the five and dime bodies drift by
cotton barely captures their hides of leather
mock they come feasting their eyes the uninspired the unenjoyed
skin like twined roe on inelegant hilltables of humping asphalt
the fullstomached and the barrenous
the stubblegaited and released obese
the adolescent chics swaddled in microshortshorts and sons and
daughters of their own walk on
sidewalks clotted with dirge
dry bubblegum bandages
and weeping condoms caked with sad and
botched hotdog stands and others hold hands

watching over out back of the fiveandime
clouds scuff in like oldtime washerwomen
scrubbing the spanknew parking meters
and all the cops are at the donut shops
notary publics down to the liquorstore
picking up twofours and molls awol from the junior high
and cocksure dudes drabbed in deadlettered sweatpants
cruising spineblown bars for commandment cheaters
in lunging games of catchascatchcan and
here
on Church Street
one young woman smiling arm in arm
with an elder mother set as a seal upon her heart
and all my transepts spires and bells
rejoice

Details | Dort James Poem

Socialight


a day we went round in cycles until our senses cracked open
our eyes into the vangogh
greens birched our ears smacked by seabirds gulls
gobbing off perchpolluted in our nostrils the toxic bay
and ozonescent that seaweed belches beyond which
we touch base grounded through our sneakers over
mandrakehandled roots thirsty the
ariels of the island it thralls me and I am also video
pronouncing this is metafiasco you leading me
landing us nowheres following the one true path to
enjambment
of the dark of chlorophyll
waterless the sun photos and we are waterless
set in a shoot of turning shoots lifeline
a fake slick of isthmus cast off cast off you
and I am all crenulations and palisades thinking this all must
come to an ending to ahead like slipshod jackdaws come
crisping across the heat toasted toadstools stopping only to talk and yes
even to each other sweating chanting hums decomposing
future memoirs spying
on the natives howling from the tourists two
last things finding binocular hands listless cutoff
from the cymbeline sand by short steep racks of rockwalls sandwiched
by soil and grass and an idling car pulsing
in the early afterlight a magic roustabout of tapping
every faculty each musty sense one more day slapped down in
stone for an organgrinding holy day

Details | Dort James Poem

Politick

an old man's mouth
nose dives

the slumping drawbridge
of an flattened fortress

rocketing obscenities fallout
fissioned lips as overtaxed
silkworms labor on

spinning cesium shrouds
to hide our dead
from presidential eyes

Details | Dort James Poem

He Should Not See Death

old enoch goggleyed and goatbearded
strolling with a jealous god
under a silksilver sun
beneath a stonewashed cotton sky
stopped
sighed
tugged at his rusty sackcloth toga
trailed a barebrown
caloused big toe through
the ochre coloured sand
stung a split nail on a surprised scorpion tail
and solemnly suggested
by way of a pleasant stutter

i know you
i know you lord
i know you well enough by now
to know when something is eating at you

the lord your god coughed
chorally
cleared his throat in the note of cee
felt in his clotted cream cloak for something
came out empty handed
tried twice
tried thrice
then clutched a nonchalantly folded handkerchief
chased the holy perspiration halfheartedly around
the temple of his whitewhiskered features
with its fine ivory linen
then threw the wet rag
absentmindedly into the yellowing dust at his tanned
manicured heel

i know
i know
it is a habit
a bad one
but habits are hard to break
particularly the bad ones

yahew nodded his licey leonine head
in a languid yep
but came there answer
no