Monday, October 29, 2018

"No Other" live in Kansas City with River Cow Orchestra - 10/13/2018


Here I perform my poem "No Other" accompanied by the River Cow Orchestra during Fountainverse: KC Small Press Poetry Festival on 13 October 2018 at La Esquina in Kansas City, Missouri. Video recorded by Jason Preu (thank you!).

I wrote "No Other" on 30 March 2018 - inspired by Tony Ingrisano's "Far Enemy" - for an Ekphrastacy program at Heights Arts in Cleveland Heights. The poem first appeared in print in The Gasconade Review Presents: Missouri Is a Ghost Shaped Thing, edited by John Dorsey and Jason Ryberg for Spartan Press.


No Other
after Far Enemy by Tony Ingrisano

A wide web of geometry and pixelation
looms over my brick suburban bungalow.

The colors warm and entice me
with creeping florescent sophistication.

I feel them drawing me up and in
while equally I am drawing them inside.

It’s a network of jasmine attraction
bringing untoward craving and resentment,

hate and cruelty from America the beautiful,
Russian bots, unacknowledged racists,

television networks, Amazon.com, nihilism
proponents, penile enhancement specialists,

trolls, moles, sexist pols and ad-mongers,
while the colors of it all bleed into pools

of need and reaction, stupefaction,
failure to listen disguised as debate,

hasty action, dystopian dissatisfaction,
snark disguised as lark and warring factions.

This poem began as an expression of appreciation
for a wide web of precious colors and pixelation

before I met the so-called far enemies
in my bathroom mirror and hardly

recognized them as something other
than other.


3 comments:

  1. I apparently missed this one, but great poem! I really liked the internal rhymes, and I didn't suspect where the poem was leading from the beginning, so that was cool. :D

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