Cul-de-Sac
Blue cucumbers pause at turnpikes.
They can’t waltz any farther; they can only
yodel their discontent.
My financial advisor told me he grasped
a meaning to this. Like using the best lives
to create a proper life
(or shall we go primordial?)
Newspapers’ advice is vice.
Newspapers’ advice is, At any voltage,
be luminous.
Sounds bingo but newspapers
are not very luminous either.
Where can we hide our limitless thinking
if not behind a wall? And what do walls separate
if not different kinds of madness?
We flatten clay to make more clay.
Then we create an alloy of a hound and a mound,
a genius of grey (who is he allied to?)
The frankness of the fractional. One brain
that fits all…
Blue cucumbers pause at turnpikes.
And it all begins again…
■
Lockdown
A tapestry of your fingerprints on the dreampane…
Existence stems from its end.
It teas like coffee, a limited edition
of a wave-crimp, a patented crib taunt.
This sternum of yours, a roadblock
against obloquy.
Today I wear quarantine grey.
The sun whistles a star-college song,
somebody gets stapled to his CV.
This smily hotel, its gaping wi-fi hotspots.
Bring me the mothball necklace
of credulous warnings.
Crystals of vision promenade with masks on.
A cemetery tune: the earth is at its roundest
under the cross. Children’s Crusade ends
under the sands.
Would you prefer a wall of music
or the music of the walls?
■
A Hand-Shaped Reality
A part-time memory cell says yo
Enter the rambunctious ocean
I once was a knife making plans for human flesh
Now I am an agricultural romantic
See my garrison eyes?
You can discover a small approximation of the world
in every pigeon hole
Even in a cashmere goat, as no one
is too big for his corral
Hand-shaping a reality
is like driving through the Sonoran Desert
on banana tyres
and then burning them for the smell
A hand and a heart
pastures of electricity
Say a beam of light pursues me
say it with the moon
■
A Collage Has a Thousand Mouths
Yes, we knew that cats have a dozen eyes, but we
never heard about matchstick horseracing.
We knew that politicians are cathedrals, but we’ve
only just learned that mouths prefer solitary walks.
Go talk to the scissorman,
to sperm flamingos.
Flap your headwings; tell this caterpillar dog
all about leg space.
Hide your target face
among spiderflowers.
Shadow, thy name is symmetry.
Gravity is overstretched.
You may think
a collage is an octogenarian,
but, in fact, it’s an octopus.
It hides its ink.
■
Ship of Fools
Find a storm in the tree
the devil in the ribbon
Check if the bottom
still keeps the abyss at bay
Remember: you’re not the captain
you are the captain’s captive
Your soul, rank grass
your day, eyeblend
The mad sail flaps
with a delayed collapse
Have a glass of ice peas
watch the bible boat downsize
These weak men of winter
their red-alarm noses
■
Anatoly Kudryavitsky lives in Dublin, Ireland, and in Reggio di Calabria, Italy. Between 2006 and 2009 he worked as a creative writing tutor for the Irish Writers’ Centre. His poems appear in Oxford Poetry, The Literary Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Prague Revue, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Plume, The American Journal of Poetry, The Honest Ulsterman, Ink Sweat and Tears, Cyphers, The SHOp, Stride, Otoliths, etc. His latest (fifth) poetry collection is The Two-Headed Man and the Paper Life (MadHat Press, USA, 2019). His latest novel, The Flying Dutchman, has been published by Glagoslav Publications, England, in 2018. He is the editor of SurVision poetry magazine.
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