Leo Obrst

July 1, 2022

You’d cut me quick if you had a knife.
You’ve sharpened your tongue to kill.
If I am thinner now, I was thinned so.
But fat man that I am, my rolls await.
Your fingernails flick along my 2 balls
With idiosyncrasies of movements as
If you’d studied the topography up it
Individually each, gauged its contours
To enable the best slicing inches deep
That would incapacitate their seeding.

Abstraction has gone now, and magic
That glides along as if hidden sidewise
Between the cracks smokes cigarettes
Waiting for its opportunity to turn up
Everything ex post facto as bent, wry,
A grin on its face to entice you to cut
Your losses to just scraps of skin, inks
That blacken minutes but not forever.
Whatever you write down is evidence
For having lived forever in our orbits.

O, come along, can’t I be a best friend
To your jarring ironic endlessnessting?

June 18 – 21, 2022

As I looked into the labyrinth
I first saw spider webs on door hinges.
This door was not opened regularly
or if so, the mechanical chicanery
was greater than known engineering
since it must have slid past silently
without agitating potential monsters.
I wept when I stepped inside the door
saw the early tread I must trod
across: people lying broken, arms
legs lifted, left helter-skelter, heads
or skulls in felt caps or coonskins
nonetheless dead, moldering brains
or slick bone shards, depending
on whether they had lain there long
enough or no one had kicked them
recently.
We steadfast ones lay
here as we would rather lie, hard
against the kick and its tomorrow
thinking we’d rather shine in Sun
even if its light had departed us
gone around the planet to another
ruin offering better penetration
better illumination since this dark
was too strong for me and any you.
I wish I could say we exited but can’t.

Leo Obrst
January 26, 2020 – June 25, 2022

No noumenon, phenomenon, or nomen
and had we a Philomena, no filament
had been pierced but once by anonymous
who scurried with his bloodied tip
to the androgynous forest of sweet
gumball trees, whose spicules littered
the righteous paths all had to walk.
We would ridicule the need for the thing
itself, as if the thing wasn’t fully rigid
in the peculiarities of its explicit existence.

Unlimited lemmings delimit the cliff ends
their brown furled bodies, bloodied
are parentheses, parents of theses
discarded by God in His exposition
of creation: this is it, all of it, all it.
The cut glass of the broken Bud bottle
shoved up into the underside of your jaw
the rippling of the trachea and carotids
promises, premises a liquid conclusion:
amid the laughter, men walk into slaughter.

Draw my own conclusions now, pull
down my pants, expose the fellow
turgidly as independent of the axioms
which can hang in abeyance until
really each of the terms is disambiguated
then eventually conclude: start over.
Fold me into folderol as if an omelet
issuing objections until the fire sears.

I wish I could sense those extra dimensions,
Like the arthritic coral curled in my hip,
Chipping away at the cartilage of Carthage,
Sinking ships between Scylla and Charybdis,
Propping a mountebank suffete on a blue chair
As Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants.
They camped around fires telling tales, cold.
Ibuprofen slips its knives into the ivory tusks,
And suddenly we sleep, our animal snorts
Not interrupting the dream we share, pain-
Lessness, the ability to run down Cat Mountain
So at bottom we exceed the speed of light,
Burst into the new day as if we were red again.

 

Obrst, Leo. 2018. The Red Ontology of String Theory. Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, 18.2, 2018, p. 95. Southeast Missouri State University Press. http://www.semopress.com/. James Brubaker, editor. Jenny Yang Cropp, poetry editor.

 

She lies again in lineament, white accenting pink.

If she had crossed her heart, she could not have been

More truthful, at least there, at the beginning, when

I introduced you to her, and she grasped your hands

In hers, two sets of veins throbbing, harmonizing,

A nod, its far distance reflected in four corneas, eyes

Otherwise seeming to consider the other well. Ahem.

 

We were spendthrift. Marble should have been pine.

Talk and oozing ounce of eyeful sorrow should have

Been sorrow. The choir edging us all in should have

Been one plaintive soprano and a saxophone’s hoot.

The dozen upturned drumsticks at the post feast

Should have been a slight expanse of sliced tofu loaf,

Slathered with a vegan barbecue sauce, carrot shreds.

 

No padre should have talked about my father. No nun

Should have stood behind him and nodded amen, amen.

Children of children should have danced up to the altar,

Dressed in scarecrow clothes, cornstalks in their collars,

Spat upon the floor, dislodging stalks as they tangled

And chanted in a sing-song hopscotch talk,

That Johnny had a plain stick he hit his big head with.