JASON MORRIS
CLOUDS
for Steve Orth
It was a pretty day, I was working on
my ordinary thing, trying to figure out
a different way to make the old
connection. The clouds formed a sort of
towering detachment — components, as
I wished to be, of some singular volume
in rough outline, like a child's drawing
of the sea. I took a seat on the granite steps
of the war memorial. It was mid-morning
by the time I remembered the blood-soaked carpets
& smashed mirrors of last night's dream.
I adjusted my hands, the way they were
positioned. My mind was asymptote to
the eye of a crow, alit just now on that step
MEANDER ORNAMENT
My most majestic strangeness
My secret weirdness
My grandest darkness, romance or danger
all these abide in my fleeting conviction
that there is some god
that one might be many
Please just continue to show me
your hidden faces
your holiness, your boundless capacity
for destruction
in the shadows of pigeons
on the stucco wall of the AMC
I can take my time, zero in on
the old breath. I can consider how scared
& exactly how not scared I am
to be human, & toying
with density & mass
My grandest darkness, romance or danger
My incurable disease
The sad facet of my final dissimilarity
that I sometimes perceive you here
in all that is fair or impassively abides. That you are
on some thin frequency, & all I am here for
the perception of injustice & beauty
EASY MIND
This is a song about the future
written in the past, ideally to be memorized
& shared w/ whomever
poems should be like recipes that way
identity another fuzzy doorway so what about
it anyway, it's a backstage list, a colorful outburst
a child who loves balloons. Stout, mezcal,
cigarettes & cocaine. Debt peonage vs.
"the unlawed impulses of faith & love"
the old story we would die to keep repeating
just to see how it ends—of course it never does
I was one who kept trying to approach oblivion
just said what the fuck am I doing out loud
I'd been propelled back into the low true world
it is harmful, the delusion of progress
a mistake one nevertheless must live by
even in the midst of this
my apocalyptic diet
I see so clear the sparrow in the leaves
"the day of small things"
attention paid (wrong word)
in occulted moments
that the reverie may appear
in the space you cleared for it there
see you turn into me, again
propelled back into the low true world
easy mind
in the algorithmic lilacs
Jason Morris is the author of ten books of poetry / other, including Low Life (Bird & Beckett Books, 2021); Different Darknesses (FMSBW, 2019); and Levon Helm (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018). From 2007 – 2014, he founded and edited the magazine Big Bell. In addition to poetry, he has written essays on Clark Coolidge's Crystal Text and Bernadette Mayer's interest in Nathaniel Hawthorne. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their child.