Ken Babstock Poems

Hit Title Date Added
1.
The Sling Of Two Arms

I held her not well, didn't
hold her well, jumped
my gaze from one eye to her other,
seeing neither, pinned one
...

Summer gnats colonized her molasses black eyes, her flicking,
conical ears. She moaned, a badly tuned
tuba, and tassels of ick dripped
from her black-
...

3.
Compatibilist

Awareness was intermittent. It sputtered.
And some of the time you were seen
asleep. So trying to appear whole
you asked of the morning: Is he free
...

4.
Hunter Deary And Hospital Wing

Hunter Deary emits noises like peach pits;
dry, scrotal humming that punctuates fits.
When a hip comes loose it comes loose
before breakfast and she pops it back in
...

5.
Fending Off The Conservatism In Adorno

At the festering corner of Boston and Queen
The Tasty Chicken House clings through May
to its Christmas tinsel, and is not long for this world.
Sanctioned colour murals under bubble script tags
...

6.
PUBLIC SPACE

Wandering wordless through the heat of High
Park. High summer. Counting the chipmunks
who pause and demand the scrub stand by
till their flitty, piggybacked equal signs can think
through this math of dogwood, oak-whip, mulch.
Children glue mouths to ice cream and chips, punch
and kick at the geese, while rug-thick islands
of milt-like scum sail the duckpond's copper stillness -
Over-fat, hammerhead carp with predator brains . . .
We can wreck a day on the shoals of ourselves.
Cramped, you broke last night and wept at the war,
at the ionized, cobalt glow that fish-tanked the air.
We're here to be emptied under the emptying sky,
eyes cast outward, trolling for the extraordinary.
...

7.
AUTUMN NEWS FROM THE DONKEY SANCTUARY

Cargo has let down
her hair a little and stopped pushing
Pliny the Elder on
the volunteer labour.
During summer it was all Pliny the Elder,
Pliny the Elder, Pliny
the — she'd cease only
for Scotch thistle, stale Cheerios, or to reflect
flitty cabbage moths
back at themselves
from the wet river-stone of her good eye. Odin,
as you already know,
was birthed under
the yew tree back in May, and has made
friends with a crow
who perches between
his trumpet-lily ears like bad language he's not
meant to hear. His mother
Anu, the jennet with
soft hooves from Killaloe, is healthy and never
far from Loki or Odin.
The perimeter fence,
the ID chips like cysts with a function slipped
under the skin, the trompe
l'oeil plough and furrowed
field, the UNHCR feed bag and restricted visiting
hours. These things done
for stateless donkeys,
mules, and hinnies — done in love, in lieu of claims
to purpose or rights —

are done with your
generous help. In your names. Enjoy the photo.
Have a safe winter
outside the enclosure.
...

8.
HOLOGRAM, AUBADE

A.M. Axe or adze? Blame the tang on Stelco.
A crow's shadow shoots
the full length of the black locust —
down, then right back up it again.
The dew already burnt off the carrots.
Dog's nose, or detonator tip
of an upturned shuttlecock like
something silo'd under the mown lawn.

Original Thingist, remember Texas?
Jackrabbits mimicking oil derricks, to less
effect, though they suffered the earth's shudders.
I just make it up —

cheap Cuervo, flea flickers in shopfront chapels, and
the tumoured bench seat of a Rambler with a history.

What if it's all meant to work
the way it's fashioned now, no
other binding property or force?

In the coming work stoppage, front-end
loaders will dragon off
to pick their teeth barracked in the municipal
pit. There's a food cache near
the tire swing. Crow knows you
know it knows you know.

When the prop shark died its tooth
became first talisman then decorative
then forensically interesting
in a two-part episode of Hoarders.

World-view of a killhorse, loosehorse,
not that you ever saw it coming
but you saw a Cassandra coming.

Quarter mile from the Polish men's choir
of frogs near a culvert, their kekking and blanging
bewilderment's agent on earth. Night's idiot
vestments now piled in the gorge. What
an accomplishment, the scarred softball!
Stand inside the dome
of sumac — what, phantom, do you feel?
...

9.
NOTTAWASAGA

Sky a motif of cowslip in clear ice,

mayflies make moon-dials of the flagstones.

One hawk. Second hawk. They were up there

earlier, as sand toads tacked from grass tuft to grass

tuft, up the pressed dune's incline. Divots

under the pin oak.

Lake level's low. Unlike

This American Life's female executive producer's testosterone . . .

E. coli trucked in

on lettuce, bocce lessons, pine beetle.

The shooter games vibrate in Balm Beach

Arcade so we squint, the better to look the part

and later leak over The Guardian. Re-apply after bathing.

Contrail or cloud pattern? We're late arrivals, like winter.

One week, cedar fence to the waterline. Next,

a passion play of flip flops. Husqvarna. An arm splint.
...

10.
AVALON, HELICOPTER

Morning desacralized, the quack
science of fog. Moisture condensing
around airborne granules of salt, it's cloud
when we make out the silhouette

of a duck. Spit, the air
hits supersaturation and spits back. Gulls beyond
the first veil: clown's horn lashed
to the handlebars with stiff wire —

Hermit thrush on the near fencepost, beaded
meniscus in the bleached syringe.
Electroshock, duster, blot. One crow's drawn-out ablutions.
If Berkeley, as we hope, misfigured the contents, and ideas

are like other things, here, on a porcelain toadstool
sprouted from powerlines, is the sum of all past assertions
on essence. Underfoot sponge,
mystery mounds, moss ottomans, and everyone's addition

shearing away from first additions. Wild rose,
tin well cap, purple iris in the juniper tangle where a brook
bogs out from up on the cape's moonscape.
Shrew and owl. Confectioners

table of black shale where the clapboard claps out.
Tut's lost prick a wasp drips out of.

Whoever it was ransacked the ossuary built
this hitching post doohicky for the clothesline's antipodal pulley.

Scalded wrack. What's the local term?
Sippy cup in the shed
near the chainsaw and widowed oar.
Breaking the Bakelite surface out there,

a minke bends into the first, the only,
race gate — two grebes —
of his zen GS. On day one
of the home fishery, Michael, over a platter
of cod, "The real is not mental,
it's mental" as the pup tent fwaps, lifts anchor.

Evening's a tranche of kids on bog bikes,
Big 8 Cola, the dew line, Sikorski bolts,
Purity Crackers, WikiLeaks, and sea smoke.
...

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