POETRY
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
Part of being a good sad person
is always painting the shadows
in the right direction and knowing
what sorrow to art with.
You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.
Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.
I like to think I’m also sprung,
released from the furnace knocks,
done with the heavy meat stews
and salty soups.
Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”
Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.
I buy too much, for someone of my stature.
could pawn a skinny metaphor to purchase a plump skin.
its reputed in our lineage— to daydream a life that shreds our pockets.
Empty vessels
make the most sound, I think,
as you rip the fairy lights off the handrail.
The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives.
