A poem a day in April from Rutgers English PhD students and friends.

Monday, April 29, 2013

from Time Travel: 1922

There was no shortage of words—
only an outbreak of rickety indelicacy
that had baked into your phrases, at their
very infancy, a blinking partition between
the unfinished and the inarticulate.
Your wild and disordered figures
broke into a high falsetto meant to
prodigiously open the dead little girl's
whitewashed ribs into a blue effusion,
a great penitentiary of reddened sound.
From two blocks away, you saw
a hundred streets feebly gesticulating
at the end of the ruined sentence
and, further out, people in wide frosted offices
who have never learned that the rapid gait
of runaway meaning can uncontrollably
attack its accuser. The fugitive month,
meaner now under the touch of your
principal industry, was staggering
to an echoed, inanimate close...
Read the rest here.

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