Simon DeDeo



Singing in Chorus

I ring a few keys: lonely.
I dream. I reconstruct the animus
behind the sentence.

Pretty hewn thing

painfully light from under shades.

The old voice I aint gonna study war no more
How could you see that wrong?

But things so far away from being right, a gulf deep and wide.

This is departing from original intent,
at home a towel warms slowly on the rack.

I want to say: can't study the human hand

can't touch, can't feel. Can't hear the distorted ragings of each self
for human love. Can't.

Give me your hand, press mine.
There is no end to living, nor the sudden breaking like radar on the distant fortress. . .

I'm gonna put on that starry crown
down by the riverside
down by the riverside
down by the riverside

I go to meet, the windows in the chorus room unfolding,
in the motive clock of selves.







Fernando Pessoa

Ticker chatter:
a thought through the line

I think it's a Portuguese man

his stock is up

on the reputation boards.

I can't think of a more romantic way to say this.

If I am God I make water: if I am for real it's all the same ambiguous
the collapsing down of wisdom to a queer reluctance to think.

You know I've been accustomed to cabs,
glass-fronted architecture, the transparency of global capital,

a billionaire makes a concert hall I'll never enter.
All that wealth and Fernando is holding.

Who wants a parade? Come hither!
Beautiful, beautiful girl. Put your leaves in my hand now we are going down to the river and history (in whom I don't believe) will throw you in.






Sonnet for the Air-Conditioned Republic

With measured pace unpeels the train station concourse.
Goes to the East gate 10, drawing luggage and holding a styrofoam cup.
Is killed in the subsequent explosion.

Time has been strange.
I think of a songbird drawing a bloody
thread through the machine. . .

Do things last?
I hope greased cogs find a separate home.

There are all these endstopped lives.
Only the ellipsis is inhuman : everything else is made for our use.

In a few months there will be blossoming red trees planted just for this reason.
I want the red velvet boots to rise over the knee, but they won't.

If there could be a single self
beating its fists against the window of the Seagram building
if only he could be seen three hundred feet about the traffic. . .

I am trying to hammer the inexpressible into expression.
People do this surely as they wait for the bus.

I -- I can't remember the time, of day, the onset of night.
This is the sound of my stereo. It is picking up W-U-S-A.
The sounds of Beethoven's late string quartets are in the air, just

those single stutters towards the divine at the end of a tremendous life.
I have three colors in my palatte and they are immune to reproduction.

I have so many many dreams.
I have so many many dreams.

I wish they could keep me awake to feel the cool breeze.






e-mail the poet at simon@cfcp.uchicago.edu
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