David Given Schwarm

Married, Father, United

Tag: poem

  • Blood Argument by April Bernard

    You insist
    that the world belongs to a stony-hearted goat-god—
    how every time we act, we enact
    his vileness; how this is no
    ecstasy, just a bad labored joke.

     Your body in spasm
    longs to strip the flesh, but if you do
    there will be nothing left but the busy
    bone-clatter of tactics.

     *

    I will listen instead to the river,
    cold as time, smelling of blood-brown leaves.

  • Fell Off Of My Unicorn

    I am often found want
    of wanting. I alone on
    the morning couch–
    coffee and compassion
    filling my selfish cup.

  • Tender Buttons [Suppose An Eyes] by Gertrude Stein

    Suppose it is within a gate which open is open at the hour of closing summer that is to say it is so.
    All the seats are needing blackening. A white dress is in sign. A soldier a real soldier has a worn lace a worn lace of different sizes that is to say if he can read, if he can read he is a size to show shutting up twenty-four.
    Go red go red, laugh white.
    Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed purr get.
    Little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles of mutton.
    Little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful.

  • Orphee [for Kathy Acker] by Neil Gaiman

  • Morning Instructions for the Doctor’s Wife

    Morning Instructions for the Doctor’s Wife

    BY 

    Accept the windowthat gives you glass, the dawnthat gives you the maple branchwith a single bud, meadowlarkssinging where you can’t see them.Keep your black nightgown on,more night than gown.Wolves in the wallpaper.Read an article about a manwho coughed blood. If you don’t learnwho lives next door to you, youcan leave the curtains openall the time. Only at certain timescan a body be sexual. The doethat meets your gaze in the meadowisn’t sexual. When surgeons splitthe coughing man’s chest with a sawand then his lung with a scalpel,his body wasn’t sexual.At night the moon pullsleaf buds out of the branch with silverinstruments. If you don’t learnhow many bodies the doctorplaces his fingers intoin a single day, yours will alwaysbe the only. Insidethe coughing man’s lung the surgeonsfound a fir tree. The dark interiorof a lung or a leaf bud, imaginedlong enough, becomes a wilderness.Your mind can do thisin the morning when you don’t havea body. Wilderness isn’t paradise.

  • Don’t Look for the Living Among the Dead

    The light is all wrong. The grid is really the problem, though
    some of the light is coming in pink or green or really bright
    pink through the industrial grid in the ceiling which will
    need to be torn down before the exhibition can be opened.

    look.

    Next Friday night, he thinks, as he drives home windshield
    wipers flapping time he was holding the glove leather and
    wondering when the rain will stop so that the sun light can
    return and he can get back to work and she will leave him alone.

    look closer.