John Godfrey
Portage
Words of excitation
strain vanity
Genre of the future
same sort of skin
Whistle in the smoke
Drop fare in
the box of extradition
Magician fakes a bus
A night made for
ultra-light planes
Pull away from likeness
It’s too much to portage
Redirection of scorn towards
base contingency
Ugly catharsis is…
catharsis
Physically negligent
and credulous
Everyone has a reason as
our first film demonstrates
You’d be alive were it closer
Skin even darker when pressed
Breath flavored apple
Sudden manifestation
of stability
Wrong has so much on its side
About the status
of, I’m sorry, your rescue
Blindside Space
I forget but life
rejects that sort
On the backstretch
wild things
are nothings
Don’t nobody put
game in ya shell
Take deep truck to
oxbow in Queens
Fold self in
foil waste
Burnt tarmac
in backstage mind
Whish
whish
carbon swords
Nitrous hive
of citadins
Subliminal fries
on the side
O the public stuffs
for neon dawn
Said better
outrage my own silence
Pop-up feelings
too quick to purify
Uninhibited raunchings
benedictus
Infected right forehead
shrinks ref
for the count
Variable blindside
space love
super-size
erotic temples
Hierarchies in time loop
Beggars act as big as me
when steps are wet
One Air
There is one air over the wall
It is a stride ahead this Friday
Land falls like raw sugar and the poisoned flood
kicks plastic out of their teeth
Speed gun on theatrical skies
Can’t go through this alone
Still there are too many in town
Eye-candy rumpled stunner runs in flood
stretched sweats across brown Texas skin
while those with only wrapping cloths
covered heads above river
to Bangladeshi mud scarp
Sky as overfilled sieve and
grave as salve nothing to nothingness eyes
Whimper little baby Little baby cry
Nothing Floats
There’s a time
you don’t just
measure by
Then there are options
They call me out
by name
Design the beach
where nothing floats ashore
and you recall
when we first meet
Intense looks
Need and inconvenience
thieve autonomy
from collective default
Remedy of Fortune
can be rejected
Waste area
in neglect
seeks open-toed shoes
More Spin
Live big in tattered world
Smallness and harm
on trapeze swing
Bird returns shit downwind
to super world
Honest crafty eyes
toddler-proof
scruples
Mental hand
lightly on
actual flesh
by gravesite of coral
You see her and no other
original shape
she lives in
Later more spin
Throwback motive
Kiss
John Godfrey's most recent collection is The City Keeps:
New and selected poems 1966-2014 (Wave Books, 2016).
Published September 2018.