Matt Shears: Poems for Everyone

Poems for Everyone
Matt Shears


& now, the graceless refrains corroborate.
& such infinities.
Where the voice that told you what the voice will tell you had told you what the voice would voice when voiced.

The compound eye, the fly.
Out among the cathedrals / mosques / synagogues and so on, barking dogma.
The full-fledged fields, thoughts of some harvest.

& now, the graceless refrains corroborate.
The bird of the word aflight, amidst the Panopticon, fearful night.
How important the weather.
They appear like innocent bystanders examining the quotidian with kitchen utensils.
How to prune the loons.
O Wisconsin.

& now, the graceless refrains corroborate.
What has the Internet made of my overactive imagination?
I lament the lament of forgotten blue skies, that pyrotechnic display that I saw in your eyes that fateful day at the County Fair so many pumpkins ago.
They propped you up, Vladimir!
And Victor, my Victor, ‘tis verse not poetry, you know.
Foucault as psychopomp.

Wittgenstein as psychopomp.
& then Michel Foucault fought Ludwig Wittgenstein!
Wow.
Cocktails, little forgotten disasters, Lunesta®.
The way they want to neutralize experimental poetry, you know.
Such infinities.
Dionysian mountainsides, the uniqueness of ice crystals.
French New Waves.

& now, the graceless refrains corroborate.
& now they do, do they, said the self-conscious,
& now they do, hunh, said the quizzical, the doubters, the self-assured,
& now the graceless refrains presuppose “grace” and “gracelessness” as well as an absent song and the idea of a refrain including all of its connotations and historical usages and the author is soooooo dead said the critically savvy
& now the graceless refrains corroborate corroborated the believers, the true believers, the chosen ones,
& now the graceless refrains corroborate, and I, too, am a victim said the others and the others among the others among the others.

Let me tell you about my otherness, I hollered toward the visible rooftops of someone else’s worldview.
(& now the graceless refrains corroborate etc.)
I am a rough, too, a hullabaloo, a bugaboo.
I am an interstitial relationship, an interesting font selection.
A deconstructed smorgasbord.
Real live animals.
Free ringtones and everything.

& now the graceless refrains corroborate.
O we who joined the ranks of the few,
O we who so bravely departed,
we who could not explain our choices,
we who dismissed the present as a fiction,
we who dismissed the past as a fiction,
we who dismissed the future as a fiction,
we who dismissed fiction as a fiction,
we who dismissed dismissal as a dismissal,
we who fictionalized nihilism as nihilism fictionalized us, O.



From Absent Magazine: Issue 04: Matt Shears: Poems for Everyone

Other poems by Shears here. And an interview here.

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So while Falsie linked to the Dale Smith poems from a previous issue on Twitter, I'm quite excited about this one.