Brendan Lorber: A Dream Table of Salt
Steven Kamenar
Devotional
Heat is what they check the door for
That and time or decadence really
Divisions that permit communication
No two clocks ever agree
and even if they did with what?
There has to be some measure
of what I’m snapping out of
The way you are always about
to describe ambiguity or something
but don’t Or maybe you do
They never loved anyone enough
the way they failed to love you enough
Divisions exist so we have something
to talk through What’s in your hand?
says the teacher to the receiver of
the note as though hearing was a sin
as though something close to open was
the secret to seduction as though
what I’m up to might not be alright
because it might not be anything at all
A Dream Table of Salt
The flavor that protects us from our own creation
or a phone I only ever use to disconnect the service
First we shed illusion in the fleshly methodology
of ifs and thens and then we shed the authority
that validates to the process The retort is a tired meme
for creating new worlds and new worlds are just as old
What’ll be better beyond remembering to knock more
or less like being locked inside a safe with a half hour
of air and nothing but the key that’s useless on this side
Even the sun’s message gets lost in the mail
and the mojo we were salivating over a century ago
was just calcinated juice of a misunderstanding
As though authentic was a thing a thing could be
I was like Kepler with a little habitable zone to keep friends in
or no more like the train engineer late to a job because
the trains aren’t running because the engineer is late
The tantric economics are also late that cibate the self’s
imperfect names for the self into a projectile that circles
the earth looking for the back of the one who launched it
In this model the end is the end but also the beginning
kept warm by sparks of a mythic cannon or
a handshake that lasts until we remember where we met
This process can take centuries between blasting
our way through a bad idea or dining in the salt mine
to be closer to the source of belief in a source
We are the ancients!
“We are the ancients!” – Filip Marinovich
We were late but it hadn’t started yet or had
but only as declaring “summer has begun”
makes summer begin But why not
the untimed signin through lewdness of ginkos
and ozone in the pores year round
vacant altar candle lit in remembrance
of the person lighting the candle Like that
Like we aren’t outnumbered by ancestors
because we are ancestors though disguised as alive
Ancients for later Late to the woods
or the roads between them also disguised methods
that time runs to believe beyond the locked exit
of a lit fuse Ancients for a time based on this one
Inside the moment of this line are all the rest
An ant with the strength to hoist 20 ants and
the 20 they bear and on through a device
we can pocket with buckeyes and flannel hands
that carry us the way a match carries light
the message read by it The lamp low before
all we can do is receive offerings from supplicants
named after us in cities named after them
The smooth moves we engineer on each other
not for the stories told of us in the smooth world
ahead but so they’ll be told in a world moved
to sweetness by our actions The unwillingness
of unlived theory that makes free will available
to the ancients but not to us Except
we are the ancients is the one part we have
no say in Our blood the antidote to the poison
of the mobilized fanbase or whatever we got sold
as good The air is hidden by its own nature
but teaches how to breathe or plummet
and how to appear from it’s thin infinity
The illusory effect of our actions got it
to go but the real effect is the action itself
and the new ancient timeline it slice
Editor's Note: These poems originally appeared on our old site.
Brendan Lorber is the author, most recently, of Unfixed Elegy (butterlamb press, 2014). He edits Lungfull! magazine, an annual anthology of horrible mistakes. He lives in a tiny castle across from the Greenwood Cemetery.
