CHOKING ON A REDWOOD - Free Poetry Chapbook

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FREE POEMS FREE POEMS FREE POEMS FREE POEMS FREE POEMS

CHOKING ON A REDWOOD

back cover

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:


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