Therefore

on the bright side of the bus
she was alone and cold
worried and stoned
laid bare to public transport
though i only understand her exposure months later
when the narrative closed unceremoniously,

as will the pool in autumn. she died

and i was alive-

a reader with a username

i knew i recognized her dimples and sweaty black bangs-

our buses used to go to the same summer camp, back where
the secret power of affected naivete was yet undiscovered
and every morning was filled with thrilling discipline
and bandy-legged intrigue

the girls from morning round-up who once held so much mystique

are now married, or pregnant, or both
running into them in random places of commerce
there is confusion, and i feel like i am trying to bridge a large distance,
speaking about the events and circumstances of life
with rock patterns and smoke signals
while all around, in The Cloud, web handles and networks collide and co-mingle,

and handheld devices and the all-too human multi-task one another into orgasm and sleep

the past is a question of pixels and storage capacity and instantly loaded rationalizations

and with this thought I got off the bus

now these thoughts float darkly in bubbles above former selves

before sleep she reappears on an PPT slideshow beyond closed eyelids

and is absorbed in the facile warp and weave of

memory's cheap embroidery

was this a foregone conclusion?

must we bring a cold 'therefore' to every small town newspaper death?

burning silent judgment and a thousand dead words of sympathy?

it seems a shameful and cheap ritual

maybe there was a time when

i would have believed in a
mathematical proof for virtue
or in the verities of other people
but growing older can make you suspicious

and possibly republican
certain things sound suspicious
‘good intentions’ ring hollow and ominous
and so one turns inward

while salesman and cult leaders

get a platform for talking coherent systems

full ranges and completions for things incomplete

for everyone else, it's no secret

new planets will appear in the sky
new dinosaurs will be pulled from the ground
wholeness longs for absence,

voice demands no voice,

stagecraft helps itself

and progress, Stalin-esque, steps forward

safely above the droppings of our samsara drift

history eats itself, hero by hero

with the reader in charge, complicit to plot

who now sits in the yard on a wicker settee, under a clear moon,

and memory a killing field of poignant, static victims

and with them we are vicariously alive

and with them we get stoned

and time after time
run out to catch the bus

without a warm coat


--bo knutson

A Brief Relation of the Copier Room

--for st. exupery and dante

One day I heard the word Mozambique and the copier room dissolved around me, and there I was on a steamy beach in Africa. Tyrannosaurs, enormous bipedal caricatures of men, stalked mindlessly across the sites of future cities and went their slow way down into the dark of geologic time.

With what honour these gentlemen entreated me and how cheerfully they received me together with their ladies, it were a long story to tell. They seemed to belong to a loftier race, and might well have been regarded as the offspring of some divine adultery. They told themselves that history was calling to them for help and that somehow they must prepare a great crusade to liberate the past; swore they’d been imbued with molten matter, and were made of gold and descended straight from the sun.

That night they took me far, far away to the planet of the flowers: 

We come thy guides to the garden of bliss, thy seat prepared.  Let’s cruise.We make a great beauty devastated of everything but form and gait.

You know you want to ride my rocket ship baby, but first you gotta light the fuse. 

I can’t even claim I knew where I was headed when I climbed on board. But from my cradle upwards it has been my business, and almost my pastime, to deal with serpents and dragons.

As indomitable energy flawlessly directed into consummate stagecraft begets complete fruition, prismatic irises crossed and shattered each other in the air.

The magic of their craft opened for me a world in which I would confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when the night had fallen I, delivered, read my course in the stars.
Astonishingly beautiful, technically advanced, and unbelievably rapid, it was a dream come true. I couldn't perceive, I couldn't plan, and I couldn't remember nothing. 


Below us the refinery was jeweled with lights like a Texas oil town. A unicorn, a rainbow-spitting zebra and what looked to be a horse sprouting a third eye were engaged in group sex. Settled on the slope of a mountain, they watched like lighthouse keepers beneath the stars, ever on the lookout to succor men. When they saw our sails, they cried out Aha, ha!  The sails of this travelling island are like clouds in the sky! What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature?

This shocked me and completely destroyed my spiritual beliefs. Tell me master, tell me Sir, I asked, did ever any, by his own merit or by others' go out from hence that afterwards was blessed? 

And he to me as one experienced: You're some kind of weird gold that wants to stay melted so you won't have to become coins. As one who sits ashore and longs perchance to visit dolphin coral in deep seas. Here must all distrust be left; all cowardice must here be dead. There's nothing more than this: opal towers and battlements adorned with living sapphire. 

These may seem to the Reader but Golden Dreams, but we all have known flights when of a sudden each for himself, it has seemed to us that we have crossed the border of the world of reality--a revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time. 

Once it is raised, not only is it difficult to subdue such a world again, but anything that follows it is apt to prove an anticlimax.We both had a fatal power to multiply, the thought flashed on me, and the planet was not large. This is the wounded outcry of the human ego as it fails to discover its dominance among the beasts of the past.

 Their like had never been seen before--and until great starships take colonists by the thousands into the fathomless seas of space, we shall not see their like again. Farewell, I bid. There is an isle of rest for thee. And I am blown along a wandering wind.

 They found in the grog shops and whorehouses of Port Royal reward enough for the dangers of their trade.

They saluted to no one and were gone.

Elm's Beach

The beauty is making me sick

River run ● Rising sun ● Light turn ● Bee stun ● Day done

Sand and bay as they ever were
The graveyards, white crosses, erosion, the swans

River run ● Rising sun ● Light turn ● Bee stun ● Day done

Reeds in the rivulet, upturned oyster,

sulfur springs, blonde grain to the marsh
always returning not as it was

River run ● Rising sun ● Light turn ● Bee stun ● Day done

In a little nest a bird is gaping for the worm

A dead fish loafs upon the bank

a banquet on sea glass and weeds

fired with maggots the gulls must invade

River run ● Rising sun ● Light turn ● Bee stun ● Day done

When I want to be there I see grass

laced with pennies and shells,
the holly bush's basketry of roots
exposed where the sand abandoned it
to keel toward the tide

River run ● Rising sun ● Light turn ● Bee stun ● Day done

When I want to leave

I see the welt upon my wrist

and a bee now scrambling the sand,

listing from my swelling hand

River run ● Rising sun ● Light turn ● Bee stun ● Day done

In a little brook a frozen crab wastes away

In a little car I stop and pray

Let the bee find basil where he dies

River run ● Rising sun ● Light turn ● Bee stun ● Day done

For what it did, it had its reasons

For what I did I had my own

River run ● Rising sun ● Light turn ● Bee stun ● Day done

The symmetry is making me sick

Now the symmetry is making me run