The Rare Earths by Dave Shortt

deeper into the interior,
vanishing exclusive rights & claims
on my darling Clementine's mind,
her 'spiritual shareholdings'
bamboozled by primal hordes
quietly flowing in superundercurrents of consumer plunder, of
googles of evolving visions in recreation

raw promethium victories over national armies
are swapped on the market
disguised variedly as 'free'
in integrations of creation's Bluechip
moving between desirous technopop chart peaks proving
funk disaster avoided, CD warehouses left dry
& heated

this was the scandium idea:
develop everyone's deepest internal lode
of egolessness-expertise,
a theory of richesse in universal application
convulsing the standard of living throughout belt-tightened dockyards,
recalling unscientific polemic of saints,
causing trembling in animus prophecies cast down
from cooling towers of fission salvation

to each then his own experience
of the atoms' Poverty, till nothing's
recovered from the cavernous mineshaft
leading down beneath 'great things,'
beneath innocent dark roots of trees,
& kiss from then on
every bit of venture capital goodbye,
even what surfaced as a ringtone
embedded in an abundant supply of friends,
who were changed to mythless strangers:
loved ones: strangers:
loved ones: strangers:
flickering on & off around the clock (in radioactivity),
angstrom'd colors black-lit with angst

meanwhile one G20 goal was to put a yin landscape into space,
where yuan geology & new disneyfied avatars
would attract tourism of a shrinking point of view:
while haves & have-nots might sleep
with phobias stuffed into their pockets
with their childhood tors if they're lucky

'more abstraction,' more abstraction
is talked about, like
'beautiful w*m*n'  still coming from inside the earth?
the close-packing laser gazes
& 'hard-to-get' magnetic attractions
that come to critique the polarity
of 'm*n's creations'?
(as a few chemists arrive to interview per usual
the unsmelted & unstable love-at-first-sight
in advance of being handled & crushed)

did weathered Frigg & Odin
leave them as concessions to human invention
in a birch-covered archipelago
when the gods disappeared into tailings?
when finally earth's bloodletting instinct suffocated,
down below?

earth, picked apart scientifically into give-&-takes,
original creature comforts, therapeutic blood draws,
unified redemptive clots,
(like reincarnated myths)
partially encrypted in shell 4f:
where once upon a time,
donor plasma gets squashed?
lumps of aerospace get strewn?
along a road leading to another vestige
of habitable-planet luxuriance?

Dave Shortt is a longtime writer (from the USA) whose work has appeared over the years in a number of print & electronic literary-type venues, including The Ekphrastic Review.  More of his poems can be found in recent or archived issues of Blaze Vox, Blackbox Manifold, Ygdrasil, Peculiar Mormyrid & the print anthology Emanations: Chorus Pleiades. Silver Pinion published two of his poems earlier this year, & another was posted this summer in Amethyst Review.

The Amalgam by Dave Shortt

overcast fills the earth cavity,
mountain cusps of original tooth
hold together the chewing vision still sensitive
to hot & cold,
to canine emotions & telepathic voices
on the wind

gameteless language-beings, peltless,
gnashing, clanking, yip,
cached away in chromium'd geology

a denture's baked cleverness
awaits a diphthong's ultimate lisped failure,
rain falls like breast milk
from the artifex Above,
while a nursing baby may vanish
in invisible plumes of incinerators

creatures working in the candy mines
(the outermost shells of humans)
bonded young with the noble metals,   
blessed with  scrapyard smiles
that would make them a star,
diamond drill of bollyhollyness preps
a winged persona for the fulfillment of the masses
freefalling in the space
of their closed mouths

accursed mercurial dimercurides before
accustoming to quasi-crazy hermetically-sealed smiles,
hydrargyrum easily packed into farthest reaches
of a decaying Milky Way
saves the bite of night, rooted in the firmament
above wine-stained acropolises
& lava flows engulfing tuskless elephants

glommed crowns are idolized
by white noise acing out the encephalo-realms,
degraded & pirated signals
are fedback with divested enlightenment & 'eat more tuna,'
mayonnaise-finned go-betweens between
instinctual nickels in neptunal lockdown
& cepheid dreams breaching unratiocinated information
at interface of salt-saturated solution (The Deep) &
phosphor'd breathable anesthesias of aether
soothing the abscesses of Pegasus

bobbing gigantic mammal Opuses
wallow under smithies of stars,
labials hammered out for silver tongues
liberalize the lingual lead
in line after line where benign flora
should thrive watered by saliva, vulgar spit
spun off its projectile path in disconnect
from mandala feelings (magnetized filings)

success-filled syntaxes grind down at night
in visitations of ruminant night-mares
conveying their riders into
fractal hemispherical text messages
that heat-shocked some snuff-tinned miners

'final' 'cautions':
modulates compatible frequency components
to universal precariousness of wisdom (teeth);
amplitudes of micro-nuclei
synchronize towards groupthink;
changes in cell gene structure
over play time, over memory;
presence of elementary magnetite
in anticipation of new asteroids

Dave Shortt is a longtime writer (from the USA) whose work has appeared over the years in numerous print & electronic literary-type venues, including The Ekphrastic Review.   More of his poems can be found in Uut Poetry, Molly Bloom, Poetry Salzburg Review & Blackbox Manifold

Hydrogen by Dave Shortt

promiscuous autonomous bonds with forever,
food & water following from the sun forming
from the one protium abundance, deuterium
was more sociable but
still their ages made them incomparable (incompatible) , she
wanted a baby who would never breathe
petroleum fumes, odorlessly would it
mobilize into moderate fusions, while
mega-bombs repressed in dark matter
slumbered, as spectacular oxidizing explosions
assimilate into heat & light's civil function,
a pleroma of solar wind comes in as waves
of disenfranchised ones with their property
of unpredictability, never to be known
will continue the deep isolation of the mass
awakening within the molecules
as neutral or charged co-existence of the lighter
with the heavier, extended & further committed,
in splendor materially,
the surpassing plurality 'alive with innate colors'
brought under its gregarious paternity
& polygamous character compounded with the ease of starlight
fomented with compassion induced
from the underground meeting between water & the fayalite, coming
from there to here & back again
the chemical chimaera of laboratory earth
occulted in its home
nurturing & morphing the legitimate residency
of the 3 forms of self-determination
born in breaking symmetries in the prime of time the time of prime,
protium deuterium tritium
in free states of radioactivity, stable non-neutrality, & endurability
'traceable to the Big Bang,' they
invisibly fuel concentrations of such peace
as are controlled by the sunrise
& are awed into corn's carbon pathways being harvested,
trinity of underground & galactic plasmas
isotopic in omnipresence,
one of the fraternal twins venturing into Kekule's benzene dream,
as the levity of bilateral talks escapes earth's gravity
& leaves the atmosphere, to be replaced
along reducing routes of biochemistry medicated or wild,
emitting equivalent appearances of potential dialogue
in the grip of consent from the auroras
predictably sharing until tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow
a change magnetized right here
into a usually incredible greenish feeling
of one period occurring overhead at a horizon
of Love streaming naive,
lightyears before & behind baryonic curtains trying to introduce
quantized norms abuzz with gassy kinetics
specifying an ant or a fertilized field
variable in strength in an organic history
held together over a drink of
whatever tastes good, transitioning
into acids cola'd or digesting the earth
in annihilation of each moment's configuration
adjectived or not,
ascetically detached from any anion-cation duality
of its position,
servant of a neutrality motivating
an equation the other side of which is numbered
unaccountable Consciousness, where embedded matrices
justify the muteness of the lightest baby of the atoms
in analysis of the desire unable to desire
& of the familiarized-with electron unable to analyze,
the alleged simplest common denominator of 'relationship,'
no way to break its geometrically-pretended longing
to provide every necessity available in the spectrum
of the spectrum
for the spectrum's every energy level innocent in need,
probably never to return to the wastes beyond when
it started traveling into the definitions of 'solitude' & 'deprivation'
actually proving itself as a kind of trustworthy shamanic daredevil,
the faithful friend lost track of,
now a multitudinous follower now the one followed,
now a primitive endowed creator lacking nothing
& everything

Dave Shortt is a longtime writer (from the USA) whose work has appeared over the years in numerous print & electronic literary-type venues, including The Ekphrastic Review. More of his poems can be found in Uut Poetry, Molly Bloom, Poetry Salzburg Review & Blackbox Manifold