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gray tolhurst

New Poetry




A MEDITATION ON
THE NATURE OF THIS ILLNESS

by Gray Tolhurst


“A wise son makes a glad father,
but a foolish man despises his mother.”

             -Proverbs 15:20


There were drunken dart holes
like stars in the walls of the saloon,
a whole constellation of failure
surrounded the cross section of the board.
As usual what blooms from within,
what is contained in the center, has the greatest value.
A person is born from the apex of the body
and the center emerges and radiates outward
in the concentric ripples of the beginning.

A vespertine flower opens its petals at night
to avoid being destroyed by the rays of the sun
while the sounds of night are set against
the relative noise or quietude of this place and this time.
Living mirrors the sound structure of birth,
tears and cries settle into an eerie calm, post-orgasm.

Now the river reflects the green grass and its cows,
a coffee can overflows with rain-soaked cigarettes,
and rusted trucks mill about like forgotten dogs.
It may not look like it but there are people here
but today is too hot and they stay inside without sleeping.
What is the attraction of this town bisected by scars of train tracks?
Why have we ended up here beside this river among the dead volcanoes of Idaho?
There is something hidden in silent houses.
There are lives contained between the rings of a tree stump.





INTERNAL COSMOLOGY


god of the liver
god of the heart
god of the stomach
god of the genitals
god of the lungs
god of the brain
constellations of liquid
atoms aligned and misaligned
hang dead as fallen oranges
in the red red river

the mouth is for speech yes
but what else can a mouth do?
speak god of the eyelash
god of the lips come out
swim within fickle shapes
the stomach, the liver, and the heart





MACHINE


in the machine of my body
I am functioning
I am receiving the data
from beneath, within
from within the air
I am becoming
the body I made
in hexadecimal systems and myth
I am becoming a body
that enters another body
that fragile structure
which receives, is prone
I am longing for something beautiful
to replace and obscure my relative plainness
I am waiting for my words
to undress the bodies
of the women of books
to drop the abstract strap
of the theoretical dress
over dimpled shoulders and away
I tried to remember
the photographs of my eye
I saw simple things
geometric structures
in my touch
I felt the rise of breath and nipples
I felt the weight of other beings
on my lips, I felt pleasure
bloom like lichen within me
in dying shades of
geothermal blue
bioluminescent green
my mouth on breasts of endless earth
dyeing sand with my seed
planting bionic roses
in the gardens of sex
to become juxtaposed
in the absence of speech.








Gray Tolhurst is an artist and poet based in San Francisco, CA. He is currently completing his graduate studies in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. His poems are about nothing and the things in between.





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ISSUE:
W I N T E R
2013-14

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