a stick is praying for my shadow and you say eat. your mom has a toothache but is jumping rope. I haven’t seen a man chew bread in person. you call baby a dug-up hand.
it’s not a children’s book but does have chameleons looking for their dead. I wrote it might you remember that I’ll watch anything. my brother lifting weights while he says resurrection that lonely mouthful. horror movies to win back my abuser.
The Unbnd Verses
poems, Kwame Opoku-Duku
Glass Poetry, 2018
~
‘maybe we are
bald headed
acolytes
searching for
the remains of
our masters/’ – fromvi. cowboyz
In poet Kwame Opoku-Duku’s work, The Unbnd Verses, in which each entry sets a circle free, mystery is a mere clue left for a personhood that is beyond the scope of belief. Inquiry is a beauty mark made holy by the non-answerable. If loss stops at loss, and one is ghostless, how is it that existentialism runs in the family and how much of this is real? If this is the silence of god, why can’t our lord name one person he’s had to bury? This writing is an act of hearing. And the words arrive, and the choirs listen.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
~
book is here:
with my body as a thing that existed from the waist-up, I became to swimming what I’d been to lightning and told my brothers that to dream they had to fall asleep before god touched his food. loneliness left its skinny tree and followed my mother into an outhouse where once her sister had counted smoke-rings and where twice they’d sung for their mouths the one about zero the forgotten letter. my father looked at me and I at my son. time waiting to create the sick.
in those moments when non-fiction scares only the grey brainchild of poverty
(that fucking angel disrobing a stone with fog…
please read
to feel
nothing
/
dying brother with microscope
last night
a horse
left Ohio
and waited
seven seconds
before
clopping back
(all cats had my sister’s tongue)
angels
had fingernails
and fish food
taste
/
palimpsest
illness
as diary
we
are underwater
where eating
was discovered
(this is our
joke
that on land
god is waiting
to cut
a birthday cake
for the non
born
the non
below…
our grief comes in pairs
to the animal
it looks
most like
/
ankle musics
i.
nothing’s unabsorbed twin
ii.
pronouns / for faith
iii.
a jester,
in night clothes, a jailed
iv.
fork…
v.
when was it
these mirrors
touched
/
(we are trying to limit
screen time
as our son
was known
as the one
being sad
for bigfoot
(it takes seconds for a bath
to fill
a mirror
with…
(I am trying to tell you that I went to the party
& that I swore there
on the lives
your children
led
(when dressed
as mine
poolside
one hears
a brother
tell a sister
it’s like tickling
a scarecrow
when do you
love god
I love god
while I’m eating
I have a mom
does everything
quickly
a father
who rubs his head
who thinks
every kid
on a bike
is a unicorn
the cigarettes
are gone
if I see
a spider
I see
it has the memory
of an angel
kingsoftrain 