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WALKING…selections
By Patrick Hurley
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categories collapse in upon themselves
strange instruments reshape
the structure of space
random interpretations of irregularity
will hold meaning if
one seeks it
vague constructions are part of the
additive art but who shaves away
superfluous matter?
#
one night in spring
jupiter appeared as
three arced bands
with a hollow center
this was a circle
broken in three places––
each equidistant
from the other
observers cried out
“what can this mean?”
and i heard a voice
and the voice said
“black water”
and the rains came
what is tritium and
what is deuterium?
what is plutonium?
traces of dense silvery terror
can always be augmented by
dark ingenuity
the voices said
“what white fire
could nullify
this water?”
#
dense lacunae
forces press in
from all sides
compressing
this void but
intensifying the
potency of
its energies
a walker may
access these energies
she may pass
through the void
absorbing energies
and transforming them
into pure color and
shifting shapes
particles and waves
might pierce the
opalescent skin of
this infinite emptiness
made small
they too will be transformed
nothing may pass through
without being altered––
a part of itself absorbed and
purified by the emptiness
#
the sound of flux
rejects fixed forms
and dead ends
words produce words
whose patterns are
ever shifting
dull minds cannot
fathom our mystic
consubstantiality
with the elements
this is the sound of
everything merging
#
textures disturbed by
an elemental imbalance
once again the ink runs
could these letters be
frozen into some
semblance of meaning?
slow motion smears and
smudges mock by
almost meaning
droplets of liquid
adhere to almost
every surface and
things have slowed
almost to a halt
scan the horizons
for incremental movement
for some sign of life
About the Author:
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Patrick Hurley was born in an unimportant midwestern American city in 1969. After wasting several years in graduate school, he published a book on Thomas Pynchon and taught writing and literature at a few colleges in Saint Louis, Missouri. He is now a full-time bartender and poet, currently obsessed with a long poetry collection in progress called Walking. He lives and works in Saint Louis.