from “DONNA”
Ryan Skrabalak | DONNA | Tree Jumps Rainbow | January 2024 | 27 Pages
Flow state
I’m just trying to forget enough about the forms their shadows and where they drink. Refuse to watch news. Refuse to go to Brooklyn. Refuse to have secrets. With which the meaning for lack was vanished from the poems. With which the poem caught between events illuminated an underbelly of what we thought was a type of fuel for terrestrial reasoning. I’m just trying to convert a feeling of politic. Politic as a coagulant of inquiries. Delirious for loving. Gaps in the surveillance. State sponsored parentheses. Mechanically separated dead labor. Which Friend Are You? Quiz. The themes are: answers, employment, jazz, sensations, walking, oral sex, shadows, unoffiicial knowledges, gone ideas
of muses, uniforms burning in the middle of the reservoir’s knoll.
Barely exists the day but we’d been in them previous alright. Barely emulsified, separating in the tunneled ends, clarified middle percussion. Percussion throughout discernable but acting more as texture than sound. More as medium than rhythm. Landscape watches me read, write, I push it back into itself. Rubbed airbrushed thorax of daytime medium rainy window to see out. Only air in stillness (air emerging constantly cleaning itself muttlike and wallowing in multivalence saturations) of blasting. Just missed that. Just missed visible to be known now through I what twists it to legible. To experience post-it, beyond-it, keeps happening. Barely in composition must honeycomb that, honesty beyond tell. Surf popping ahead of you and so you grow up there too past death
beyond emergence outside the sentence machine.
But the father augured in me as everywhere destination for growing certain in ways certain. Questions (pressing ocean to land) rose in mouth. Deliver us from the philosophy of houses, items disproven in commodity haze, allegory read from verso back, tranlated into a demonstration of trees. The canoe bobbed into absence (absence as fact strained from lyric, unforgettable in revealing). Presently in the canoe I offered the disruption of my person or an event
of just so barely sequenced utterance.
I have this poem to give to Human Relations to be outside yourself or listen. Moss listen anti-war listen somewhere similar up to my eyes. Watercolor in dream phoneme I hope this reaches you up like where. Are you now above us where I do my work. I sweat the trying where I had too much. As a net result of a shadow peeled from backwards understanding. Development. Was harbor in. Does the stream like hair parted. It separates itself in echo detained from sound. Of hurt event as dripping lace. As ambient mode of desire as saturated fantasy
out of the politic cogaulated thread to bring us fabric vanished.
From DONNA by Ryan Skrabalak.
Copyright © 2024 Ryan Skrabalak.
Reprinted with permission of Tree Jumps Rainbow.