“Poetry without Borders” on the one hand suggests language that engages others in our (necessary) misunderstandings across borders. But like doctors without borders making house calls, poets without borders need good bedside manners, need to be kind. But the highest kind of kindness would be not to have to read a poem in the first place, and that is the aim of poetry without borders: borders without the need for poetry.
On the other hand, borders are points forced into lines, and the points are lives interrupted in their happy crisscrossing.
Personally, borders make one nervous, wait, suffer.
Poetry becomes sexual release diverted to borders. It’s not fair to the poet.
If not for border interruptus forcing poetry, life without borders would drastically reduce the need for doctoring at checkpoints and that means poetry.
Poetry for me is minutiae, not of one scene, but many. Metonymy. Line to line and even within a line borders are crossed; metaphors are driven away. The metaphors poets drive doctor the minutiae of far-flung places.
Thus, poems pivot upon possibilities for infiltrating infrastructures so as to inoculate borders before one even nears one.
Poetry ushers in hopes of borderlessness and ideal translations so that we may turn around anywhere and move on from the business of kindness to love.
TOY DRONE
Does it matter whose searchlights
lifted off the ridge to pin us down?
Bulldogs lent their gruff legs
under beaming magnolias.
Now you ask how we lost
our favorite clown point-blank
just passing through sidelines in the sand
of slogans set in motion.
It feels like it feels
to swivel at twenty paces
only to find yourself surrounded
ear to ear with the wind.
It creeped us, the way sunrise fondles foothills
as the fog burns off.
I know we vowed never to open that box again
and never close it.
The idea stands on relays,
what swings the axe,
which particles blink in the fiber
of ether grinding to an act.
I mean mobs still assemble
but ghosts of what burned out
to correct incursions, bruises,
kid-gloves and valley talk
flicking fingers in order, silence broken
in peanut galleries a sense of an ending rose
with the moon, tipping the back-story
held sway, doing its thing, those daffodils
were really poppies crossing the fertile bank
where everyone spread out, taking cover
to look for the ninth planet
crawling on elbows, then tumbling on board,
knees to chests, squeezing in
for the long haul, hoping
to reach the pass with us
of all people, before a second snow.
(First appeared in New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing)
