Mark DuCharme

Antic Phantoms
To Whom It May Concer

A civil saturation
Is not unwelcome: jihad of former
Glories: after the faint
Union puzzle, it's all over

It's all over, Melanie Fink
You are a great wrestler
No, I don't know a Francesca
Over in a flash, but you don't

Touch
Arranging orange selfishly by
Pose
No one is more faint

He's got prose & a billion
In transitions, falls apart
This fetching
Erudite marquee this static

It's all over, & you
Are a great
Advertisement for why these poems suck
The poems which suck are not

My poems
It's not collated
I is elsewhere
A redundant part, & you

Are makeshift cultural capital
Breaking back in order to
Disarm
The arc of what it casually represents

It's not about the money
It's not even about them a little bit
I couldn't escape it, in the final crunch
The moppets were subject to turbulence

Jagged, in their tangential finery
Monochromatically jilted
A whole theory & alignment of shifting
Heads off into sudden brush

Or cling, this unrepresentative
Carton opens up like static
Resemblance to noon fidgets
You don't see that on game shows

In a stockade of plotting
Reprehensible rewrite thrills
To stop yuppies any hour
Better built hour aria

Ash skip turning ave limit
Must turn Baptist table
Nor graders after adult speedways
Loosens the flow of the heavy hitters

Skip lane wrong coffee
Art quiet least ramp
Quiet engines era leap, exactly
What you said

Incomplete shoulderblade effacing I-
dentities of spree
Yes you can't come in
Dealt with in a flicker, till you

Don't budge, or can't discover
This heated hour, my saleswoman
My adroit pucker
Thus does the paramour grip boxtop

Where the rigging's hampered
(Trampled)
Don't get greedy it's all over
Here is one more example

There's something about linoleum
Remaining (dull) in theory
What rules now have been altered
Scratch the picture (engine blast)

The handlebars were totally up to snuff
I let it roll, on a loaner
Here my motor-psycho accident was incredibly blaring
I have a number of these things memorized

All is wrong, I don't know
Beans from next mail-in digit
Freeway lopside the spread-eagle
Then another buzz

Roman fetid boxtop knack
Have one, then let's go
Faded, in commercial set-up
So loped it wouldn't spool

The Inspector will see you now
Is also bad news
Perhaps, if it could be turned off
In spring, the constant shudder

But excuse me, I can't use that word
In fact, I almost forgot it
Her name was Marlene
We called her Margot, & went out for hops

At the local jobber's swank homeland
Etching toward impermanent recoil
Sometimes it's better to call you up
Than to enlist in the English Navy

Clampton's the name
I get indulged with small bills
I am easily sketched
Please, no calls

Mark DuCharme's first collection of poems, Cosmopolitan Tremble, was published in 2002 by Pavement Saw Press. His most recent chapbook, Anon, co-written with Anselm Hollo, Patrick Pritchett and Laura E. Wright, appeared in 2001 from Potato Clock Editions. His poetry and essays in poetics have appeared in numerous print and on-line publications, including -VeRT #3. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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