Unshod Quills

 Art and Poetry of Seattle’s Mark Brunke

“Border-Captain, I am determined to make you Duke of Lithuania.”

– on Lipstick

Put some sugar on your knife Potemkin, I’m watching you drown in a song.
I equally dismiss empirical
Atheists and mental Christians;
I prefer the misery in mere
Carrots and of love’s first glimpse.
I remember a time before lipstick
and it stays within my nails,
Where all beings clothed in vapor auger in
To a moment of desire’s nothingness,
Where the center of verse
Was godless among us.
Oxygen separated, in midnight’s cruel
Skin, a day’s hunger younger than us,
Oxygen deprived, moonless magic in animal
Skin, laying tasted, in a candy cane dress,
stained with sausage oil and mustard seed.
“S’il n’y avait pas de Pologne il n’y aurait pas de Polonais!” A. Jarry, Ubu Roi

MB

Recursion Problem, these

– on Mirrors

Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

America sends its regrets
as an advance on its rejections,
an historical imperative where
soldiers die for an after death.
Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

Terrorists we call them, cave
artists painting their
violetless particles in the last waves
of a grayscale ocean.
Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

Soldier’s epsom salt of slow incentives
priced in a sickbay decay, the dirt water
smell in the declination of a fading
Earth, drown in a curtain, bathe with a Cross.
Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

The crickets in the field, in the green
grey waltz-twisting body, the pitch on the death of
Mars lays low in bloodrose and disintigration;

lamb mouth. I
do not need to ask how I got to this, the river
Where I am childlike and charred, mirror of war.

MB

Author and Artist Biography

Mark Brunke lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

Tagged art, Lipstick, Mirrors, Poetry, Seattle, Transportation