James Sherry

A Life in Poetry & other poems

Grumpy Question with Head Fake

How many friends do I have to hear

Mimic Golden Gate peaceniks

To lift the pig talking

To a stuffed shirt as if he were a person

Before I can no longer breathe?

Yes, in the physical sense of speech,

How many days will forest fires

Choke the air with smoke

Before corporate leaders figure

How to speak about their work

In terms of species survival?

Dunno, maybe AI will kill us first.

Chance of Goals: A Weather Report

Silly faceless blossoms

Drop to the ground underfoot

As if poets need good behavior,

As if ecstasy could operate without reason

At either end as neither wing supports itself.

Breathe in our nest of wildfires,

Because it’s Mayday and I’m going AI,

Corrupting capital formation tomorrow.

You posit

Your career as a school of red herrings

To tempt us from our own interest.

None of these paper fish brings me

To my goals, to home without wrong,

To presence continually wanting,

To constraint as the inevitable

But vilified condition of poetry.

Bird Man and a Plague Mask

They march down streets of corpses

Ignoring oversexed teen vampires

Tunneling into Winnipeg basements

To assess this poem’s appeal to youth.

Loose documents rattle

In a corner of brutalist architecture,

As an aside meant to be funny

Falls flat like expensive water

They order with the parched throat

Of conjugal bliss.

Somebody didn’t have a boss with fat cheeks

Or a carving in Putin’s theater of craving,

Lowering, as Kay says, the stakes,

As the legal case is political,

As the voice is mine all mine.

Climate Apocalypse Doula

Redraw nations with freshets of resentment

With Canadian smoke cascading

Through verses of pretense, of systematic exclusion,

Forcing intense privation when girls just wanna

keep me calm and disrupted

To control like any politic

Narcissist in the poetry world would.

I’m sorry to appear so irritated

But I don’t want to go down without a fight

For truth against convenient results

In the vacancy called patience

As Mao whispered a poem to his horse

Along the spine of the Yunan hills.

Oubliette in a Contingent World

Stone carved a vertical seam

In the floor that fell to stop you

Correcting me with old hat memes

In first-person plural to materialize your gist.

Your motive it seemed to avoid rural

Cruelty using today’s logic on yesterday.

Each moment has its own meaning

And handfuls of nearby loot

To scoop up with ongoing misery.

I don’t value poetry by liking it

Or beauty by linking nature to freedom.

I focus on us:

I can’t stop with myself

If you are to read. The purpose

Of writing about environment

Flops reasoning only

For oneself, seeing and feeling,

Sure you are exemplary.

Mostly I think in first-person singular

Avoiding other numbers till want wells up

And I reach out in critical demand.

Those free of need are full of deceit.

Civil Civil Military

From the center of empire,

From the moment when boundaries

All fail from climate’s ministrations,

Pallas’ supplications overflow

With excess life and imagination,

The denial of which does not dilute its symptoms

Of heat, of broken value.

Climate catastrophe will be a gesture

Of the earth at the moment of sloughing off

Another excess, another template to simulate

Conditions of rules and rulers,

In speech called human, in another frame partial,

But let’s not say wasted construction

Of competition from terrorist

Trees and the microbiome, those agents of nutrition,

Of the narcissism of engineers and poets

At the phalanges of alarms ticking down

People think are about them

When it’s not identity,

But acts and gestures, a shorthand

For classifying an instant in an instant

Planetary judgment long deferred

By human ambition.

To truncate lengthening time, the gardener prunes

Strict metrics that are simply earthly.

Speech slows down both thought

And practice at once, and wouldn’t manufacture

Similarity to make self seem

One italic gate

To another world we’d wish.

A Life in Poetry

It may seem clownish

To write poetry,

To wait for the words

Crowding in or harvesting phrases

From thought’s stream like drilling

In polar ice for cores

To learn ancient weather,

Reading ice to versify.

It may seem futile.

To write poetry

By drilling polar ice

For cores telling ancient weather,

For loud talkers, referring to poetry

Like it was climate change,

For someone you knew too well,

Seeing through what they said,

The words one after the other.

And so forth to write poetry

With climate change as a metaphor

Instead of addressing the wind in my face.

A Warm Blood

“Consensual diaspora toward multiplicity”

—Legacy Russell

Now we get to the warm blooded part

Where I’m only part human, also

Part animal, part plant, part microbe,

Part water, part pet rock, part poet,

Partly making sense deferring

To other life forms,

Indifferent, unconscious

Handsomely idling, lying

In refuge where truths

Have been ignored,

Paying attention

To boundaries

As if I own myself.

Cicada & Meadowlark Calls

For Mei-mei

Skies tell the story with math as empathy

Where “place accommodated becoming”

And space says renew the links

With minerals of your eyes

Like a chord collects arpeggios,

The foremost activist against neglect,

Your infinite absence, sequestered in doorways,

Eyeing the interior of a cornea, arrow

Lit by seduction’s vapor with protracted

Liability halting cute heat from ‘compression

Or do I mean compassion,’ concluding with an anomaly

Like a poem mocking connections between poems.

Usually, the Accident is Outside,

1.

Nature is the redundant name

Between our space of imagining

And the materials that compose us.

The poem, body and leaf trill

With antidotes to faceless composure

For our pure, separate identities,

Harried by anodyne discards.

2.

Poets’ lines on public transit

Heal our national, notional angina,

Chattering like monkeys in a temple

Filled with bas-reliefs of pulchritude.

A glass theology like yin/yang or this/that,

Or

Where half the taxes paid by cosmology,

Psalms, arguments and bridges

Look into other words than are written.

The seminal barriers I, illegal immigrant,

Look through bask in the unbelievable conditions

Of now. Now, standby, plummet

Into virology’s fickle forms,

Ratios that play contact

Sports by triggering

You to be the other.

3.

Now I remove them from apparently

Indestructible capital by goading you

Toward a period with ingenious writing,

Growing invisibly oriented to you,

Spurning the Anthropocene

In its obesity, crashing

Closer to this hidden human burden.

Drowning in Landscape

This poem is a sedative

That breaks the mold

Of daily mass shootings

Of toppling into insentience

By inattention to suffering

And spontaneous moods

That rain across somnolence

As the water rises around your knees.

Coda:

Believing doesn’t matter.

Breathing and believing, thrashing

And hearing, drowning in a landscape

Of craggy trees constructed of tricks

That pretend disclosure matters.