Missing and Presumed

Everyone in this picture is gone;
That’s what it takes to invoke the world.
Truth could be the law of the father
Or a rock in a rock storm.

A map’s red lines display shortest distances.
The blue ones tell us what to think.
Why “parent” rhymes with “parrot” and
How long the dead remain dead.

There are always three choices:
The feast, the ordeal, the cul-de-sac.
Meanwhile, every lyric impulse
Caresses the dirt in our mouths.

If this is where light comes from
Then music must be an echo of the big bang
And a new prime number can only exist as
Infinity regained, a place to hide in broad daylight.

Path of Least Resistance

Thought engraved a devoted world
For each blind and celebrated image.
So we consigned our trust to ambition and
Applied for citizenship in the wax museum.

Just as a picture becomes unanchored from
The idea of a picture, the more we learn
The greater becomes our ignorance, until
Each resemblance creates another, unconditionally.

In a perfect world, witnesses are
Nothing more than indestructible puppets:
They receive thought, crack heads, then walk
Into the past precisely where the past is.

Eventually, we will substitute the figure
Of many with the word for empty.
Anonymity will be our just reward:
That blessed purple match head.

Profit Margin

Every choice is a round trip
From wilderness to climax
Among a knowledge that exerts no gravity
Between seeing and the thing seen.

Like a perfect virus
Or a bride in the dark, we want
What anyone wants as if
The reciprocal was always true.

Only the author can escape
That chorus of particulars and
Rain from below, a continuous
Failure which keeps us immortal.

Nevertheless, we dig and fill
Burn and pour, haunted by
The act of acting and the inequity
Of eternal solace.

Plus One Plus

To locate a unified single subject
Fold and tear moon from earth
Or imagine us endowed with aboriginal fertility
Scratching with pointed sticks in the dirt.

We like to think that fantasy battles reality
Because pictures easily adapt themselves
To any available space and every
Silence imitates a freeze-frame consensus.

But the dead hate that metaphor of sleep
As if each absence implies enclosure
Or a class of images craving projection
Back-lit by the verso of chance.

Eventually we will return to the senseless
That home-away-from-home prose
And prescient fear of falling between
Unequal half-hours and every flawless deceit.

2/15 of a Second

A newborn “O’s” her mouth
To the hums of passersby.
The natives are restless:
All praise hopeful monsters.

Express yourself.
Subscribe yourself.
Today, like yesterday
An insolvency unendured.

In the desire machine,
Hunger forms flesh.
One window conceals another
Gathering a familiar light.

According to reason
God has no mouth but
In the river of stain
Everyone’s name is each other.

Copyright © Craig Watson, 2002.