New for Side A: Three Poems from WHAT by Robert Kocik

proto-anything

Sunrise light day sunset night dark. Sharpness of shape-
less white against blue. Unbearability of ticking.

Grievance blight, life changing quiet, the way of things
with/out us. Another antler chandelier.

Sculptor’s field of marvels overgrown. Blooms of jellyfish
clogging aircraft carrier’s cooling system.

Nail polish next to erythromycin. ‘Composting’… a word
for earth’s reaction to our works our words.

Mental emotion block building. Unelaborāte happening.
Phenomena’s own experience.

It’s so simple to break methodical beat that (on the other
hand) our contortions are part of industrialization.

Is self destruction? Are conditions? Heaven and earth
thrown into turmoil. Suffering was already whole.

Is something not a mistake? We’re eighty percent joy.
Wellbeing attracts disruption.

Worms having burrowed deeper. Man’s radionuclide
signature. Air war luftkrieg war on the air.

Carrying on as usual only potato beetles already
used to our poisons.

Peacocks turn colors as their feathers process and
purify the poisons only they can ingest.

Where all’s well heroes bring problems. Plants help us so
we’ll spread their seeds.

Nothing is far more unstable than something. A piece of
furniture placed like an acupuncture needle.

Distractedness is the great strategist, stressors
stratocractic. Distinct from whatever I’d say —

not my will but listening’s — swept up into the throes of
word, the terms of the furthest shore.

Not even the leaves move. My daughter’s feet are cold.
The sense of this being finished.

A person finished with people.

Return world to its potential.

… did not make an impression.

phonophany

Ubi tunc vox inauditae melodiae? Et vox inauditae linguae?

between thought there’s no disease
who’d want to be but consciousness
where our shit cannot hit the fan

matter merely a muttering
when words are no more than meant
no meaning without melody

before what-is was, is known as:
the sound of the words we now speak
rising before we know what we’ll say

repair this writing as you read
repair your reading with what’s written
bring together beginningless and this

phosphene

The Grammarian viewed any sequence of letters or sentence
as an obstacle to god’s speech

which is destitute of sequence — the way insight is timeless.
The ideal distance from the heart

arm’s-length, check the pulse there. Zoo closures
during pandemic saw animal birthrates rise twenty-

five percent — a reverse effect of our encroachments-as-
the-cause… into language we think is ours.

Conquerors of SARS-CoV-2, we did it again: quash the
wild that lashed back at its ingrate guest;

vaccine convenience versus virome indigeneity, coming
out on top of the sinking

soil of hypnotic poppy fields, keeps us from paging back
in time back in body mind and word to

our consummate encroachment causally underlying its
kind: seizing the speech offered as gift

in indivisibility, nature/nurture our Creator Parents,
we put on backwards our feet

step onward deface the face game the name desecrate the
grace tout the buyout of that which made flesh —

Robert Kocik is a poet, prosodist, trans-disciplinary essayist, teacher, artist, and designer/builder who lives in Brooklyn. In 2006, working collaboratively with choreographer Daria Faïn, Kocik initiated a field of research called the Prosodic Body, an experiential artscience that explores prosody (the tone, tempo, intention, intensity, and total body language of speech) in relation to movement, bioprocesses, and health. In 2008 he cofounded The Commons Choir, a multi-lingual/racial/generational performing group that draws on the findings of the prosody research and presents socially charged operatic and educational events. Kocik writes the scripts and librettos for the choir and constructs installations and sets to accompany choir presentations. Architecturally, he seeks out projects in need, projects with a purpose, social vision, or beneficial mission, using methods that countervail the usual violence of construction and exclusivity of the architectural process by working regionally with local materials and crews, traditional skills, and site-built furnishings.

Poems excerpted from WHAT with permission of Auric Press

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