Ronald Palmer
Two Poems (with Audio Versions!)
I Only Dream in Gasoline
I remember in shapes your sharkskin hands: trance eating
In the urban parking garage under nauseating piss-stained light
Thinking in trickle down oily cells—memory gushing.{In gender’s ailing adhesive—
The hybrid genome
Reins supreme: spelling out ‘boot/camp world/champ’
A floating comma
Made of steam—
I only dream in gasoline. }I’ve heard the word IRAQ (eye-rack, ear-rock) 7,000 times
This year rising fear’s primary membrane
glazed between power and repetition:{I might meditate
By which I mean din
Between commercials: chewing: a head without skin—Limb to leaf to bud to boy—
Come for me: I am queen of apple crisp
When I return to sissylisp
I craft a monarch from banana cream.A chronic sceptic, sonic hat trick—
My rage mirage
My protective tint hides an evil-glint.I am the scent of peppermint.}
during rehearsal the placebo effect evaporates a fist quick to your forehead
always at the same tempo always said by the same actor
cut a stale monologue make the script think quicker{Brother bitch
Churns his torso lean
With his big muscled rump in the air
And his pomade-shiny dinnerware hair.Tumorless mistress
Of the silent screen.
Toss me into a dumbshow scene
I only dream in gasoline.}Ask myself: Am I this vibrating blackness scampering?
Tell myself: You have to earn your own pampering.Nightmare in loserville: shirtless plump rejected bears
Wander their cartoon man boobs toward the next zoo smell:
The fatigued audience falls into feral memory.{Gloomwork tightens my trampoline:
Trapped fetal triplets float and glide
Porcelain plunged in formaldehyde
Along with Mütter’s phantom team
I only dream in gasoline. }————————
Extra Special:
click here to listen to Ronald Palmer read I Only Dream in Gasoline
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Rules of Swarming (Long Version)
Feral memory fails in a loyal trove of algorithms, stalks a false
winter where the first frost is bluish
at the excavation site
tentative successor with stinging inventory
and mock magnetic.
The counter requests
A swarm must begin with iconic symbolism,
in this case, by mimicking a virus:
becoming a blind hunter—with Peter Pan Syndrome
as long as there are children
to play HALO2 inventing Machinema
and finally obliterating the spirit.
Directionless, as Bush’s Law is nervously mutating, a human
provoking a swooping phantom,
We hear it like a State Secret
torture-tear the air.
Sky-swimming terse knots
To tame wind like an invisible gray, old grizzly bear,
{Corporate people in the sad trap I am a box inputting data getting cancer from
our cell phones and computers. Better than cube life even though the car becomes a cube.
An anticube boasting the same properties of trance, high-pitch frequency static in the
inner ear. Dork drinking session on the veranda ends like a commercial in negativeland.
Be sure to be yourself.}
A bound sum makes a private mind, mining shame
Flattening into a black hole
pupil from a tornado
to race and erase streak’s horizon, then wrap a tree for game.
There is no predator to be found but weather.
Impish loners veer and dart through blind’s interior:
Tethered together in shark-like silence.
Retracing frantic spring,
storm-brave bodies
Change into glossy chips: bluish charred bone—
Ocean waves know how
infected wounds heal:
how drowned minds feel
Imploding with a trauma that travels in mad wings
Circling and circling, saying I fall out of winter I fall out of sentences
I am giving you this black torque of fallen kings
to seal your last
breath’s explosion—even the vast
desert is a pit of vices and penances.
All death’s meteoric. It sings
and rings
underwater.————————
Even More Extra Special:
click here to listen to Ronald Palmer read Rules of Swarming (Long Version)
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