Three Poems

by henry 7. reneau, jr.

splinters

of space-time . a cartographic
and chronologic repetition with no edge
, a horizon that retreats as we pursue it
. everyone who learns from the past
is a library , is a most dangerous person

to be . the year after i was born
, Allen Ginsberg debuted Howl
at the now famous 1955 Six Gallery reading
. it was a perfect poem of protest in progress
against the past , stepping over the hypocritical debris
of Suburbia’s nuclear family

. the harder we grasp
, the deeper we fall down . we euphemize 
our sins , while missiles spear shrapnel
into everyone elsewhere , over there , and invisible

. as hate is perfected , what now can be said 
to comfort the single Black mother who weeps
inconsolably in the wake of her loss , too huge
to be held in the grief she struggles to voice

? this U . S . of ignorance , fear , bigotry
, violence and greed , despite
the folksinger whose guitar three-chorded
: this machine kills fascists

. in an era of melting glaciers
, of weeping , sheared-salt tidal surges
, the climate-warmed arctic ice
, outward and onward and higher 

in incremental ocean rise . the ocean fish
plastic-bloated , and swollen burst to death
. the shit flowed unfiltered from water pipes
, and evening news awash
with flash flood stories , or wildfires
run rampant , on the hour , every hour

, and our solutions feigned as genuine
, albeit transparently marginal . the threats
we foresee , but distort , deny , or are
distracted to a dismissal of . and all that is
deemed improbable (we still have time)
, crouching as clearly favorable odds .

temperance  

. the streetlamps making . mechanically . many moons
. electrically seething . my walled-in backyard

. is a prison : fact and opinion fused in contradiction . mortared
brick on brick on brick . a fenced-in Suburbia of reality vs.
you need to live in ! reality . a self-induced hypnosis of self-denial
. the two wolves within . a doublethink paradox 

. the fallen , withering leaves of smog-/break Japanese cherry trees
, an auto-monoxide exhaust-stained [un]purple-/ness of life

. everything we see could also be otherwise . a Divine hand issuing forth
from a storm cloud in the Tarot . congregated the world as subliminal
into the world . to utter the unutterable beingness of the world , of being
in the world . no ! look here , and here and here and here , and there

!! stopping at circumstantial points to consider consequences , before
evolving into something else . is progressive—becomes an example of
how we might move through our days . our public and personal histories
called forth to determine the power , the resolve to always . begin . again

. as if an acolyte of the exquisite

making visible the alchemical machinations of desire , exposing a stranger
plane of being just beyond the surface of the ordinary , a trans-/ness of
perspective dissenting in times of accepted atrocity : the apparatuses to
mount deadly thoughts on a track to take out an interracial wedding party 

, to target someone we have never met , eye to eye
. who but an oracle of riotous sense and ecstatic vision could
so incisively depict desire’s exit wound

and probable futures refracted in the rip , kindling electrical stars

in our life’s blood ? who but an oracle ought to become
in our present battlefields of embargoed being and [un]sanctioned

brutality ? our every action is conditioned by something else
coming before it ; evolution does not come from nothing

. there is no first cause , no magickal agamas of smithereens
. everything is necessarily both a cause and effect . a wisp \
brushed from the eye . the dispossessed utterances of those

who did not get to be , could not continue to be
their own utterance , but be-/coming .

(cause and effect) , or an awaited exothermal

our tears
are the precise chemical measure

of the oceans . a saltiness we know
, but they do not see

what we always see , a middle
passage away from home

—both place
and mother tongue—and into

the gloaming , because we are
always watching

what their mouths say . always
listening , to what their hands do

, measuring what has been
withheld and granted selectively

. the rock salted wrongs
we are not about to forget

. we heave . we gasket-seize and
blown invectives—to not always be

too hundred-weight mule-burdened
and tried-our-‘las nerve snapped

. we grieve a Fibonacci sequenced
murmuration of a thousand wings

. we adapt a homing instinct
magnetically drawn to +’justment

. their cause enflamed our effect
. a stealth of incognito

like salt sprinkled to keep the devil at bay
, to navigate a sea of possibilities

as both predator and prey , both
vulnerable and complicit

. the tensile shape of the human
condition and the catastrophism

of our indecisiveness , are morally
flexible , salting the dextrous trinity

of choice , chance
and circumstance—a stutter

in the billions and billions
casting outside glances (they

say whatever justifies
despising us 

, like every time a fly lands
, it vomits shit

) , implementing human hands
to jacquard loom a nation of hurt

. the unconscionable chaos
we see all around us

like a last chance option of mercy
, a strange angel that protects us

from however the hurt may come
. after centuries we seizure-stagger

like chipped gears after vile epithets—been
spit upon and gunshot . the arrogant

transgressions , until we Molotov-ed
the wrong side of the tracks to conflagration

. we copper-boxed an armature , shattered 
a cascade of exothermic sparks

, and the sun rose tremendous
. we could see nothing

but blinding light . a god-shaped hole
. . . and then , the country caught fire

henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words of conflagration to awaken the world ablaze, an inferno of free verse illuminated by his affinity for disobedience and a barbwired conviction that prequels the spontaneous combustion that blazes from his heart, phoenix-flared red and gold, like a discharged bullet that commits a felony every day, exploding through change is gonna come to implement the fire next time. His poetics are situated at the intersection of experimental modernist and autobiomythographic free verse poetry. His work is published in Superstition Review; TriQuarterly; Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review; Punt Volat; The Ana; and Oyster River Pages.