Djelloul Marbrook: Three poems

Handling plutonium

So this business of being you
is about handling plutonium
and is much more dangerous
than your parents said.
You stumbled across yourself so often
you became your own nightmare
and then one day the sun rose
on a world where winners and losers
cast no shadows. You saw no choice
but to turn your back on the game,
to remake the world with your painterly eye,
to be a forensic sculptor, to let
intellect’s Luminol reveal
what fears can’t bleach,
to stare at the consequences
even as they throw dirt on your face.

*
If I had a painterly eye

here’s what I would do to celebrate,
I’d show me atoms of something else
in the manner of Seurat or Tanguy,
a congress of memories,
a sufferance like Frankenstein’s beast
becoming more than its parts
hankering to fulfill their longings,
I’d witness the sidelong world,
I’d lay my own ashes,
I’d make Athena blink.
I’d study brash ice.
Failing that I’d call failure life.
& unmask myself as a firefly
nobody caught in a jar.

*
Escapade

How I change you with a look
signals our painterly lives,
colors we make of memories,
canvas bared to reticence,
dilutions spelling scent,
solutions ecstatic in themselves.
I take the task seriously,
I’m able to correct my work
and I know its pentimento
will be explored. Snapshots
never interested me, nor beauty
agreed upon by voyeurs.
I like inspired mistake,
a peripheral glance that jars
our nerve ends loose,
diseases that best define
our escapades at being well.

—

From Brash Ice by Djelloul Marbrook, published by Leaky Boot Press. Copyright 2015 by Djelloul Marbrook. Published here by permission of the author.