Golden Flies by Kurt Cline

Golden flies

spill thru my eyes.

I’ve been looking for you

a long, long time

been searchin’

in the tall grass,

goin’ back into the past,

movin’ mighty fast--

a penny a poodle, a dime a patch!

Fondling medieval girdles

a shadow jumps of me

a-hangin’ from a tree

even farther away

really quite beautiful

the calico chambermaid

has never done this sort of thing before

in a maw of crows

a pit of sky

spiraling palaces

the glint of eyes—blue diamonds.

Under a cloud

of insecticide

valuable commas

lace the night

headlight beams

play across the ceiling

shifting too quickly to assume

any fixed geometrical shape.

Now I’m squashin’ out my cigarette butt,

feelin’ kinda generally fucked-up—

my reflection in the fun-house mirror

of a man who’s fought with phantoms far too long

neither gettin’ off   nor gettin’ it on

standing alone on the blue glass lawn

among the steaming masses

where the airliner crashes

golden flies

rise up & they arise

in aquamarine eyes                                                                  

all there is or ought to be.

Solitude dissolved the universe

on a park bench

& only the stars

to share the instigation.

It may as well have been

the day after tomorrow--

slices a shadow in half

formed in the foaming

empty & empty & empty some more

true dissolution

gathering materials

before we depart

everybody gettin’ by

everybody ‘bout to cry

& I know someday I’ll die

but it won’t be tonight

the lie lifts the truth

out of the sky

& the night

fills up with golden flies.

I cower under crumpled

newspaper headlines   imagine other “i’s”

while the haystack steadily diminishes

under agitated skies

in the fantasy

in the factory

in the trajectory

slightly mistold

sacramental cowries

& mistletoe   time bubbles

in the ruins of the fortifications,

in the sun on the lawn on which the children play:

settle me with a promise

& give it to your favorite charity:

I’m just yr Christmas clown,

yr 4^th of July scarecrow

with a fire-cracker crown.

I’ve been all over this god-damned town.                              

Stupid Helen screaming at the seashore                     

kicking at a pile of dust.  Me?—

I’m sitting in a hotel lobby

wondering who I can trust.

Her ships are sleeping in the harbor;

her cavalier is turning into rust.  Me?—

I don’t do things because I want to

but because I must.  Crazy Mary weeps

a spunky river, zigags across the desert plain.

Someday, somebody who reads this will know what happened to me. 

The panther paws the cagefloor;

inside, out-of-tune plays the “Masquerade Waltz”

a little something I composed for a film

went around in circles & tilted to a halt.

It’s a little bit sketchy

between this & that  living-dying

breathing expiring spiral dance becoming being

cataclysm but emerges all right in the end

indistinguishable

from the occasion,

identity’s disappearing act

sandwiched between the pages.

Author bio: 

Kurt Cline has been a poet and performance artist for the past thirty years. His poems have won awards and appeared in numerous small-press magazines in America, Europe and Asia, and his performances have garnered media attention and many positive reviews. His full length poetry collection Voyage to the Sun: Poetry and Translations was published by Boston Poet Press in 2008. Cline’s folk-punk CD, Alien Shoe came out from 12 Studio in Taiwan in 2013.  He is currently Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at National Taipei University of Technology.  Scholarly articles have appeared in Anthropology of Consciousness;Tamkang Review, Glimpse: Phenomenology and Media; Cuadrante andCommunication, Comparative Civilizations and Cultures: Journal of the Jean Gebser Society.