Three Poems

Will Alexander

Fastidious Numbing System

American poetic literality
fastidious as numbed terrestrial fatigue as blunted range
as numbed authority
as assumed cultural notoriety

 

On Garish Unnerving

One speculates
one evinces floatation
there persists toxic crystallisation partially alive as phonemic disjunction perhaps
by possessive wrath
by filmic pull ululation
that explodes into blazing
that morphs into crystalline inaction
not as perfection
but as altitudinous dwarling
into benthic alignment with itself
with its own emblem
not as moral or taint
but as form by merger
as substantive alliance into states where garishness implodes into seeming unnerving
where its seeming state implodes into disappearance
not as voided misnomer
or anomalous swan
but as kindled procreation under the moniker of dice
as stunned transmission that leaps beyond itself
that morphs into own singularity as ambit
not as wrath or lessening
but as possibly scrawled chariots sizzling into soils
as form by possible ignition
as anarchic salvation
via true emergence by glint
as cobalt flexibility

 

HIERATIC OASIS

My sojourn with Julie ends as a timeless contact. Her living space not unlike a dove flashing upwards from timeless groundwater. A timeless energy not principally as quantifiable hamlet but as magnetic symbiosis. Her enclave naturally appears as quintessential utterance that ranges from human artistic transmission, to the enigmatic flight of differing butterfly ensembles. Therefore life erupts as a magnetic living system that includes various shadings that range across natural flora and fauna. One can evidence the latter not only as a powerful oasis, but as a charismatic crucible of forces. I am not speaking of architectural highlight in Cleveland, but a hieractic oasis that principally magnifies and attracts.

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Headshot of Will Alexander

Born in 1948 in Los Angeles, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and musician. He has published over two dozen books in a variety of genres and has earned many honors and awards including a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry, a California Arts Council Fellowship, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and the 2016 Jackson Poetry Prize. He has also exhibited his artwork in group and solo shows. His work is known for its visionary, oracular surrealism and the influence of Negritude. Among his publications are Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021/Granta, 2022), which was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, The Combustion Cycle (Roof, 2021), Across the Vapor Gulf (New Directions, 2017), and The Sri Lankan Loxodrome (New Directions, 2009). His book Compression & Purity (2011) was volume five in the City Lights Spotlight Poetry Series. He is currently the poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. He has lived his entire life in Los Angeles.

Cover of Charismatic Spirals by Will Alexander

Charismatic Spirals is for an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological and political consequences.

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