And two more prose poems.
By Tony Kitt.
◊
The Back of Beyond
At the crossroad of prognostication, a thief penetrates non-squeakiness, sigh by sigh. His cautiousness germinates stupefaction. His apple heart sheds seeds. He has been preparing for this moment by oiling his joints with money syrup since the birth of his inner hamster.
“What’s on the other side?” his eyes blink. “Is it the treasury of promises or the ministry of judicial blindness?”
What he actually finds there is an enormous hamster wheel. The men inside are running for their lives, which ensures that the wheel generates enough energy to power a couple of newspapers.
•
Through the Haze
Doors are at war with the outdoors. Shadows apprehend meadows. This tremor of delirious veins, the ping of busy fingers… What do walls separate if not different kinds of madness?
A metaphysician places yellow thought-corns along the borderline of order, and somebody tracks him down to some suburban mind pit. Can we lock the gate between the world and the moralistic minefield? Are we allowed to live imperfect lives? Yes, but no.
Shadows inch in, century by century. Ampersands grow through the wild silicium of consciousness. Say “a beam of light pursues me”; say it with the moon.
•
A Glass Dream
I was sitting on a pillow of dreams. The marble murmuring of my body… Tiny earthquakes buzzed about tiny earthquakes. Passers-by launched pigeons filled with lava.
A man crossed the Desert of Not-Plenty pulling his roped tomorrow along. “Our shadows may be book-shaped, but the reality seen through a glass dream is televisional,” he said to me as he entered the city sea.
Somebody labelled “Unimportant” was talking sense to sensationists, so they could search for humanity in procrastination. “All the idlers are infidels,” my goggle-box sputtered. Angels of sensual divulgement wagged their lyrical tails while the doers undulated the careless propellers.
♦
TONY KITT lives in Dublin, Ireland. His poetry collection entitled Endurable Infinity has been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, in the Pitt series, in 2022. A collection of his early poems, Sky Sailing, is due from Salmon Poetry, Ireland, in 2024. His chapbook, The Magic Phlute, was published by SurVision Books in 2019, and another chapbook, Further Through Time, by Origami Poems Project in 2022. His poems appear in multiple magazines and anthologies, including Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Cyphers, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Matter, etc. They have also been translated into Italian, Romanian, Greek, Ukrainian, and Chinese. He edited the anthology of Ukrainian poetry about the war in English translation entitled Invasion (SurVision Books, 2022), and was the winner of the Maria Edgeworth Poetry Prize.
