Write It

Write It
by Gideon Burton

Know this: if but an inky remnant scrawl
awakens memory, then wake. The wake
of thunders sunders, echoes, spreads and sprawls,
and you have heard and known it for your sake,

as though He tuned the atmosphere to breathe
your breathing. Rhythmed right, alive to light
too light to sink or wince or falling leave
the falling leaves their crimsons breaking bright.

So fight, so grasp two-fisted, whitely tight
what was to you so present thick with fire
with floods of rushing hushing stillness. Bite
the sugar-stinging bloody orange. Wire

and weld the ever wonder, page to ink,
to keep untamed, alive in all you think.

composed 12-9-12

A Perfect Language

A Perfect Language
by Gideon Burton

So tense with time, conjoined to circumstance,
whatever nouns you name or verbs you voice.
We feel in chaos, think by music, dance,
in subtle hues, in sudden shades of choice.
Then come these crude stiff knobs, these waypoint cues
made up of rough-hewn syllables, designed
to traffic code, but we all know the ruse.
We know, and yet to words we are resigned.
And yet, though thin and spent, though prone to fraud,
to fashion and to fashioning-- they work.
They play, they pay fresh dividends though odd,
and often something holy in them lurks.
     The perfect language is the one you use
     in faith that somehow, something will ring true.

Photo: flickr - Joris Machielse

Luscious Peaches

Luscious Peaches
by Gideon Burton

Don't picture them, forget the way they smell.
It's not the fruit that's sweet; it is the sound
of luscious peaches. Say it! Can you tell
the way the S's slosh in slushy mounds
of fructose-addled consonants? It seems
a sin, almost,  to speak those luscious peaches,
moist-ripened in each repetition, clean
and fresh, four syllables and sonic leeches
suck in or out the nectar nouns, a rush
of breath, saliva summoned, ready fruit
unlike their orchard counterparts that hush
to silent wrinkled pits once down the chute.
     No need for Autumn's chill or season's prime;
     I say my peaches, lusciously they're mine.

Photo: flickr - floradog

Refraction

Refraction
by Gideon Burton

Through which glass darkly viewing: book or page
or Latin, lens or focus, resolution, screen?
Along what vein projecting: inky age
or pixels perfect, language evergreen?
At certain angles textures cough and claw,
or smooth a prism's lancing of the black
confusions time accumulates in raw
and mute abundance. Certain masks retract
the numbness; certain fabrics sew the sense.
A pattern is an optic, matrix, stone
Rosetta, glyph unglyphed, thick verbs untensed;
dark algorithms make the darkness moan.
     Like sheep from goats, the signal parts the noise;
     simplicity's complexity that's poised. 

Photo: flickr - philobiblon 

Not Aloud

Not Aloud

by Gideon Burton

I'm just not going to say it -- not aloud.

You know how some stuff changes once in words,

how certain thoughts live only in the cloud

of demi-memory, in halves and thirds,

and verbalizing sets perimeters,

commits you to accept or to react.

Crude instruments! As though altimeters

suffice for pitch or yaw. The lens is cracked

that focuses as clearly as a word

defined. Unwind those denotations, blur

and smear the wash of colored music, stir

the safe obscurities: alive, absurd.

     The drums might rhythm smooth our wrinkling brains;

     to speak or write welds thinking into chains.

Photo: Flickr - Thomas Hawk

Let Her Speak

Let Her Speak
by Gideon Burton

I waste my words, encumbering thought with flesh,

all mashed in glottal mush, the meaning pressed

against the palate and the jilting thresh

of time, occasion, cues mistook or guessed--

She speaks my name as though to keep the air

from bruising it, as though upon her tongue

it lies, a flower petal thin and rare,

and any extra syllable, though sung

with grace, would loosen filaments or cells

and leave a shredded shell, a noise profane

and blank, no longer sounding down the well

of mystery, a label, fixed, inane. 

     My libels thrive on every breathing wave;

     she calls me once, and all my words behave.

Sinking Metaphor

Sinking Metaphor
by Gideon Burton 


The ocean like a ragged fabric scrapes
the passing vessels, coral-clawed and cold.
It's just a running metaphor that shapes
the currents of my thoughts as they are rolled
from stem to stern, at odds with what is level,
with anything that's docked and roped and sure.
Oh, I could try another one less beveled,
and it would work until its edges blurred
into cliche or quaintness. Look, the storm
approaches (outside, inside, both). Am I
prepared to leave comparisons so warm
with frigid drownings, whales and birds and sky?
     Whatever freight of figures sinks inside,
     you grapple it for all drowning ride.

Image: flickr - Lrn2Go

Unscrambling Chaos

Unscrambling Chaos
by Gideon Burton

However tightly I compose these lines
of verse, however densely sewn the meter–
though sealed hermetically, the thought confined–
the center stuff breaks free, its soul far fleeter
than I can compass with a sonnet's rope.
But still these rhythmed strands I weave again,
and yet, escaping well beyond my scope
of rhymes, clean past the fences of my pen
quite out of bounds, like water sunrayed free,
the sense defies the "water" "sun," and "ray."
The words I use I find are using me,
and nothing, like a breath, will pause or stay.
     Like iambs I will breathe with even stress,
     unscrambling chaos with this wordy mess.

Image: flickr - alles-schlumpf

Words to Slow

Words to Slow
by Gideon Burton


I need the words to slow me, slow me down;
if only they could regulate the flow
and flux, this rivering desire that drowns
the sense of senses till it's all I know
and see, this sphere of lava that I tongue
and swallow, swallow into fissured thought
where musing's fusions press, compress, till sprung
into this webbing mesh of fiery knots
reknotted onto moorings anchored where
but where to settle this and these? Compare
the scrape of bone on slate, and if you dare,
then tell yourself that dreams are made of air.
     Compose me, sonnet, nothing's tethered sure.
     The animals within begin to stir.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - wwarby

The Play's The Thing

So, after taking a van full of students down to see a performance of Macbeth at the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, Utah, here's a theatrically themed sonnet:

The Play's The Thing
by Gideon Burton


With humid breath, with labored lungs and heart
Awash in sticky sweat and flush with heat,
Gray language finds its colors in your art;
The slack of time grows taut within your beat.
It is a bare occasion, yet you dance;
You fight with pricking foil in blazing peace.
Your anger rouses, given half a chance;
Brute passions flare, then mollify with ease.
I am compelled; each footfall keeps the eye.
You enter, exit, silent in the wings,
Then bursting forth, you laugh or you may die;
Perhaps some music rises as you sing.
        Play on, for your performance I attend;
        The play’s the thing that’s caught me in the end.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - balbano

Verba

Verba
by Gideon Burton

Each letter has a shape, each shape a sound,
and every sound resounds on lips and tongue.
We taste the language smoothly, form it round.
We crave it, feel it, from the time we're young
enough to know the rhythmed consonants
as toys to play with, not as means of thought.
(Abstraction slackens, verbed in violence.)
We all pretend the sounds mean what they ought--
these breathy signs, these squiggles spilled in ink
are records of agreements old and new.
Within our minds they channel what we think,
but fail to reach beyond to what is true.
       They are but other bodies, formed to die,
       but leave us less than speechless as they fly.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Marco Pelà

The Wordy Wormy Path to God

The Wordy Wormy Path to God
by Gideon Burton

With warm abstractions fortune bathes my hopes,
as though the sound of words could baptize time,
could fast adhere to heaven’s dangled ropes;
as though her breath could cause the deeps to shine.
I also summon words and with them pray
to God, expecting, reasoning my way
to fond conclusions.  I have felt their sway
and thought I could with words cause peace to stay,
or at the least some mandate send on high.
But Babel speaks so clearly to my mind,
I fear the house I'm building as I ply
some wordy, wormy path to God. Resigned
to crudest tools, these forms of ink and air;
I wield them, spend them, send them, foul and fair.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Image: Generated through Wordle.net from the words in this poem.