Art & Letters Magazine Editor Shares Poem Of His Own

April 30, 2020

This piece originally appeared in Viscous Verses, a monthly poetry column in the Boston Compass Newspaper edited by Art & Letters Magazine

It rains. One steps up through the haze of tan and violet to the maze of memory--misty where one stands, twisting, separating strands.

The hour's dim, and no one calls; obligation mutely falls through floors of mountains, origin: anonymously you begin.

The blasted lantern of the nerves lights up the sky, where starlight curves; below, on earth, some few pass by sheer constructs of identity.

They swirl and plaster every sense, unto a law of difference: not clear how long, or what direction, subsume the nerves in their inspection.

The skeleton's examination evokes, incites, brief procreation: filed away, some future date astonished memories locate.

The seraphs of pedestrians seep into violets, into tans, breaching desire's boulevards; throw down the last of evening's cards.

There is no way to formulate identity's raw nervous state: it seems to slip into the world, by stellar facts and atoms hurled

into the mythic stratosphere. Ideas formulate the seer. Genesis sans génération. A change of trains at London station.

—Ben Mazer.