Robert Frede
Kenter
is Canadian-based, disabled, pushcart nominated poet, writer
of
prose, visual poet, visual artist, editor & the EIC and publisher of
Ice Floe Press. Robert’s work is widely published.
Cerebellum
Imperial clocks with stardust smocks
the aching drying tree
Little boys crack the branches off
dreaming of their father’s condemnation
of nature with consternation
Condemnation fathers dreaming
cracking branches off
the aching drying tree
Smocks of stardust smudged sky clocks
the black night industrial
Colony
The travellers approached the water. It’s surface, a
mirror, entangled with seaweed. Searching for their reflections, lying awake in
the dark, voices from radio stations with strong signals came from some great
distance. A voice discussed the depletion of the forests. Hundreds of years-old
trees, on fire. In the morning, in a withering path between abandoned orchards,
a small boy, out of breath, was happened upon, still tending apples. A lake
shimmered, golden hues matching the burning sky. Smoke. This waterway, he
argued, its toxic, you cannot enter it. The boy’s personality is like a
foreign language, an intrusive body, an immune system, at once so awesome,
alien, deadly and beautiful, said the philosophical traveler, filled up
with an untouchable fear of contamination. Filled with gentleman’s thoughts, he
advanced, you cannot listen; it hurts the ears. O Radioactive
Gaia, I caress your surfaces. You are so very delicate. Shimmering. To touch
your death grip cough and bestow the name on you, River of Hope. Acidic,
representational instinctive. Reading with a lilting quality, cataloguing the
mirrored surface of change, in the longing of atlases, the hovering direction
of faith, the cartographer stared back longingly, like a white porcelain doll
in a monsoon, a hand-painted, abandoned reflection. Not the nailed feet of the
travellers, tied to stanch blood with red ropes, using their Dictaphones, to
name the cities: Buenos Aires, Georgetown, Port of Prince, Sau Paulo
remembering India, thoughtless about Brazil. But that wasn’t the most troubling
element. Even in the Imperial claims of history, everything had changed,
everything tilting towards a commodity glut of cargo ships full of question
marks plastic pens the detritus of rainforests in overflowing barges a purged
universe now cleared for cattle raising. Country of birth, somewhere behind
you, telephones are ringing. The boy said, please, you cannot swim here. O, to
speak to no questions, to call forth no deficiency, to burn, but not for your
acceptance. Hard dry earth undoes the mood of change, staring back with a
violence scattering, the scoured, many embraces of colour.
At the Scrivener’s Hotel
At this inn of nails
drawings of drowned cities
lost people,
discarded spoons,
mulched
Scriptures
Ciphers,
fountain pens
elliptical quarter-moons
Sapphire - Sapphic
Excavations
Painted signs
of milliners
on the sides of
dust-cleaned brick buildings
Red earth
The drowned
rising up
turning over in
entropic sheets
A canopy of trees upside
down
In the sea
roots, dangling in
sky fields
I’m a Babel mound
The pit of light
A gleam – a wink -
A glint
A glossary
of martyred
Saints on hammer headed
nails
with Doll eyes
their tremor of card shark
hands
Islands of first technologies
Fins, incisors,
molars,
Eyeless
skulls
of hunger
The land-locked Jupiter
The Bright Haloed Saturn
Painted lilies in desert night
Bitter
burnt sugar
at trough
slop buckets of scars
cold wet mouthfuls
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