Ronald Palmer

Two Poems (with Audio Versions!)

I Only Dream in Gasoline

I remember in shapes            your sharkskin hands:  trance eating
            In the urban parking garage                 under nauseating piss-stained light
                                    Thinking in trickle down        oily cells—memory gushing.

{In gender’s ailing adhesive—
                        The hybrid genome
                                    Reins supreme:             spelling out ‘boot/camp   world/champ’
            A floating comma
                      Made of steam—
                                    I only dream in gasoline.               }

I’ve heard the word IRAQ      (eye-rack, ear-rock)     7,000 times
            This year rising                                   fear’s primary membrane
                        glazed between power                      and repetition:

            {I might meditate
                                    By which I mean din
            Between commercials:             chewing:  a head without skin

            Limb to leaf to bud to boy—

            Come for me: I am queen of apple crisp
                                  When I return to sissylisp
            I craft a monarch from banana cream.

            A chronic sceptic, sonic hat trick—
                                    My rage mirage
            My protective tint hides an evil-glint.

            I am the scent of peppermint.}

during rehearsal the placebo effect                 evaporates a fist quick to your forehead
            always at the same tempo                          always said by the same actor
                        cut a stale monologue                                     make the script think quicker

            {Brother bitch
                        Churns his torso lean
                                     With his big muscled rump in the air
            And his pomade-shiny dinnerware hair.

                        Tumorless  mistress
                                    Of the silent screen.
                                               Toss me into a dumbshow scene
                                    I only dream in gasoline.}

Ask myself:      Am I this vibrating blackness scampering?
Tell myself:      You have to earn your own pampering.

Nightmare in loserville:                         shirtless plump rejected bears
            Wander their cartoon man boobs        toward the next zoo smell:
                        The fatigued audience                         falls into feral memory.

            {Gloomwork tightens my trampoline:
            Trapped fetal triplets float and glide
            Porcelain plunged in formaldehyde
            Along with Mütter’s phantom team
            I only dream in gasoline.                           }


————————
Extra Special:
click here to listen to Ronald Palmer read I Only Dream in Gasoline
————————



Rules of Swarming (Long Version)

Feral memory fails in a loyal trove of algorithms, stalks a false
            winter where the first frost is bluish
            at the excavation site
            tentative successor with stinging inventory
            and mock magnetic.
            The counter requests
A swarm must begin with iconic symbolism,
in this case, by mimicking a virus:
            becoming a blind hunter—with Peter Pan Syndrome
            as long as there are children
            to play HALO2 inventing Machinema
            and finally obliterating the spirit.
Directionless, as Bush’s Law is nervously mutating, a human
            provoking a swooping phantom,
We hear it like a State Secret
            torture-tear the air.
            Sky-swimming terse knots
To tame wind like an invisible gray, old grizzly bear,
            {Corporate people in the sad trap I am a box inputting data getting cancer from
our cell phones and computers. Better than cube life even though the car becomes a cube.
An anticube boasting the same properties of trance, high-pitch frequency static in the
inner ear. Dork drinking session on the veranda ends like a commercial in negativeland.
Be sure to be yourself.}
A bound sum makes a private mind, mining shame
            Flattening into a black hole
            pupil from a tornado
            to race and erase streak’s horizon, then wrap a tree for game.
There is no predator to be found but weather.
Impish loners veer and dart through blind’s interior:
            Tethered together in shark-like silence.
            Retracing frantic spring,
            storm-brave bodies
Change into glossy chips: bluish charred bone—
Ocean waves know how
            infected wounds heal:
            how drowned minds feel
            Imploding with a trauma that travels in mad wings
Circling and circling, saying I fall out of winter I fall out of sentences
I am giving you this black torque of fallen kings
            to seal your last
            breath’s explosion—even the vast
            desert is a pit of vices and penances.
            All death’s meteoric. It sings
            and rings
underwater.


————————
Even More Extra Special:
click here to listen to Ronald Palmer read Rules of Swarming (Long Version)
————————

 
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