stuffed
palms hand out a
crimson dawn hangover
the razed settlement of regents
swooning with revved-up-elation
for the other as if they were friends
bespoke “my fronds, you are inside
the queen,” laughing at man &
woman crying squares, one
fine mourning on the is
land of a gentle
purple
green
the beautiful
interface of day time
coasts along
in a cape
covered in tarantellas
the heart sings
a hum-along song
a lush
breeze to light up the ocean’s
windows
for the mind to drink & travel thru
Asia Italy America
wherever a decorative
elegance
awash with pretty globes
can construct itself above & below
a period in one’s history
like lit tunnels
like royalway systems that
left abandoned
form glaciers & Mount Etnas in need of
maze-bright runners who can
crack the real up
into ruptures of blooming flowers
cherry trees for drowning in
the Shades
bacchanals have binged on
since the grand canals of Carthage
& now Brooklyn
scars borrowed from Venice Berlin or
anywhere so long as an
imagined epic
landscape can form a self
defense theory
with embankments of surround sound as
vast as inland Australia or as
singular as Japan
a personal temple of autumn
to escape to
one’s dependencies
one’s inner-built visions only
dawning
in the night as a
fridge trembling open its
golden freezer
face
down under water
way off
sure
Note: Both ‘Royally’ and ‘Pro Me The Us’ are inversions of poems by Arthur Rimbaud, Royauté and Promontoire. These “translations” were assembled by recycling the French through multiple languages on Google Translate before landing on English. The English “version” was then turned upside down and rewritten.
Toby Fitch is the author of Rawshock (Puncher & Wattmann 2012), which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, and two chapbooks, Quarrels (Stale Objects dePress 2013) and Everyday Static (Vagabond Press 2010). His latest collection is Jerilderies (Vagabond Press 2014) and he has a book of inversions forthcoming, as yet untitled. He lives in Sydney, Australia.