“Knight of Experience” and Other Poems
May Jason Wept
maybe that’s what’s
always Common, all knowledge of the ground
out in the world where no one, greenly, sleeps
In Cassville, Joplin, Eden, Oklahoma,
Lawrence, Kansas even, Greenly. Even were
the levees brought to quays, all that’s common
of the gourded wrist-strap
( shaves a better bridge.
A bridge? Facets of the Dated
range— Town genre, “kisses, ties,” then sleeps.
But better?
I sleep— The vineyard, too, a freighted cloth
it breathes! A time for Job and a
pen for Rear, off all the gardens of its dearth.
Was it for THIS? He squeaks
Earths, earth Mosquitos, lemons, fat
Perhaps
Wordsworth’s cottage facing hills of “mossen gay”
In Bois D’Arc, Battlefield, or the light there’s
charge reflects, a later charge A weapon
crowding in a chair , does it even crowd the chair for this
Any which, conversion to the common element
compounds the penny and that bends the penny
until I pick it up
The offer’s worlding score….
houses where the keys are minted, I thought
There’s law in love, white
Lonesomeness, smokestacks one’s binds can’t handle
just can’t but for the courage mounts
And for the benjamins whose concession erodes
The sleeping giant's crown
But better sleep forth it comes takes medicaments
shines, purrs, , it sings
On the same old what?
One look. Tomorrow, and that’s it there
The end rolling one’s look forward,
as if the train made noise
Knight of Experience
A relatively bloodless affair, hmm…
tenable land for aphorists (?), love’s
Willing river, and Delmore! At the monitor’s
tinkle, Clicks the album twice, its kicks
The Singe of too much memory revolves
the silly indemnity. To the land’s great sea,
the / body “On this day…” love’s (murdered)
name ,on the list Flood’s language, the lamplight,
These fine collapses that are the names one takes,,
Or for grasses (fine) that
the dream had faces was enough
for now—Out-throwed,
that Beacon swung
Caused a pin some hours in the spine there later
to emerge, replenished of its texture, converge,
emergently, re-emerges what "in the lonely alleys
make," And yet one laughs? One laughs. A fixture
What in the lonely alley makes one’s only vessel flat
Slight deltoid pinch, a tune to be recalled
Stag of Mourning
Beginning again-
st
In as much as some secretes one asks the litter “Why
?” Why secretes ye so upon the banded nine, nine
Times out of twenty and nine times out of nine, The
Covertures’ iridescence? , Kessler’s arcing
the tell, of which my Dale has shepherded.
Saul’s knife, his wife
Withholds she such the moon-milked canapé (!)
Of what which stinks in heat? Stinks more.
This gardened anything, Asks “who?” stop’s,
wing-shot, coilshorn, in the garnered head of state.
Is it content’s land? “I once knew and now
It’s I who keeps the cables warm.” Yet, she’s
shaved down to her core,
A witch the fjordsong, or plover or to what’s a plover
The saw-drawn tincture says: To either
signal, a mirror pockets its decision
Perhaps on a great painted stage it filters out—
that you thought that
thought-statistics kept a groan from burgeoning—
You, who, though you thought you knew, were the only
Who that knew: A myna’s hail, and whose
pajama’d bottom-sak that’s flatlined, followed-out,
and frill-less,
Makes us make of us
a fartened maiden gesture
Amid the the who walks so whitely
He walks in sand, keeps watch for passing cars,
That’s framing…? What frames Paul’s life
Want’s polygon
Covered Wagon
Up to that point
I had from then gone
On to end thinking
In such an era as that
To end such an era
I had then gone
Albeit from one point to
Another thinking to end
Thinking and since then
Have felt life trickle out
Like a thick braid
in a fanbelt
Or a thrust in the air
Like a thick braid
caught in a fan
Where I had then
When the era had such that
It needed
That blink of an endpoint
That flash of a thought
Burst at the nape
Where the bead gathers
Dust
Cary Stough is a poet from the Missouri Ozarks and a former library worker from Massachusetts. He is an editor at the Cleveland Review of Books. Find more about Cary at carystough.com.