FREE POEMS FREE POEMS FREE POEMS FREE POEMS FREE POEMS
CHOKING ON A REDWOOD
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FREE POEMS BY MITCH MANNING
Find me @ messagetoearthman.tumblr.com
CLAM POINT PRESS 2013
FREE POEMS FREE POEMS FREE POEMS FREE POEMS FREE POEMS
Thanks to: ALL RIGHTS UN-RESERVED PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF
CLAM POINT PRESS 2013
CA Conrad, Audromar, Brother Nicholas, Jared Stanley, Megan Berner, Muffy Brandt, Jen Hofer, Telegraph Hill, Delores Park Lady in the Bike Pants, Pot Holder, Bob Wills + His Texas Playboys, Too Much Coffee Man, HHDL, KevRen05, Malibu Beach + LS Smith (aka the Kook) for rewilding.
Eating Mochi in Cathedral Grove
Arrowhead Marsh
Brook beds blocked with fallen red woods, old growth condo complexes for bugs and fish.
oasis inside Bay Area people growth
I can see the center of my heart: salted chestnut wrapped in rice paste.
a plover’s pointed toes are pronged like a flag making a declaration some kind of eco-annoucement
Japanese sailors, Okayama factory workers, thank you for coming together to form this perfect convergence
the distilled thought of our own imaginings
of cool, dark, warm and salty, where light falls on fern, tree trunk and the forest whispers sempervirens.
airport, track homes, trojan horse shipping port cranes encircle us heavy mercury saturates but the marsh emanates ataraxia pleased with its dank sogginess this poem is composed on the armrest of an emergency exit this poem is now an emergency all of us are suering quietly in our anonymous vehicles sequestered from each other the nature of that is radical
Windshield Heat the sun is our fast reminder that we can still see the carved up highway our motors roll over my friends, listen
There’s a rest stop on this super highway somewhere to sit and watch the cedar trees angle their ironed needles down
turkey vultures are up on the hill’s edge can we still relate to their hungry call?
A stroll is a tree walk is a meditation in memory’s tangled garden
stitch a hooked beak on your flag run it up a carved pole let it speak out there in the mud
The moon carves an S into the river bank where the crabs forage for food + make perfect spheres of sand In a forest park, a spirit bear In an empty field, a magi Unravel your spiritual rolodex Examine a blade of grass, a land deed, a crow tattoo Carve yourself out of that hole you dug
Staring at the Gradient of the Sky
make magic seek no answers unwrap tidiness distract yourself from what you’re doing bind your energy to no boundary there is no index of blood no thought catalog of dreams open a locked box pour out the sand you are being born on one side of the world alone on an island
Erasure: Jen Hofer’s Al-Mutanabbi Street Shroud
Body Politics at the Horchata Machine
I see 2 avenues opening up If I missed my plane to Dallas legibility implies a viewer!
!
listen, try to listen Would you meet me in Memphis
!
+ mourn for what you do not see And have breakfast with the King
words are rubble !
open wounds At a Shoney’s Endless Buffet?
what is truly home?! ! It’s a free-spirit free-market world I am here!
!
but I remember there Munching on a snack planet
! how do we map! the body untouched ! ! ! ! ! an exchange of indecipherable messages
Our freedom is a cold glass Of aguas frescas on Valencia
!
delicate thread
connect us Where the lights turn from lime
cross the bridge as !
a ghost out of the text To orange to pineapple mango
we are always marked by sense My love is brewed and imported violence silence presence absence And these chips are so crunchy when books burn!
do we ingest them through air?
there is a world!
!
+ the person is in it
Golden Thread
Imagine a pixel, digital blot, a button holding the world together ὀμφαλός the nurtured center, reach inside to find who we were before we blurred into hologram hallucination — Our navel knotted flesh is origin, its sticky middle holding back our spilling insides
Graffiti Wall in the Sand atomic construction ( ( ( ( ( (
The ancient world was in my reach from my rooming house on Venice Beach ( - Jonathan Richman
a penny is a penguin is a penis is a potato when we eat spend piss swim we collide with who we are
it’s snowing in Boston and sun soaks the Pacific nothing feels congruent except the simultaneity of everything
perpetual presence constant constancy the world lives on our shoulders
world is text and tools will read it sail, pen, tire, song, drill, hook
+ we are buried up to our necks
there are mountains in the sand + sand is buried in the mountains
in our own unknowing
we carry places we’ve known real + imaginary like ghosts inside our human machines ask a dog to speak ask a flea to dance they can + they do nothing is reduced it all comes from the same substance: