Tuesday poem #141 : Pete Smith : CONDITIONALS: on not divining Dendroctona Ponderosae (mountain pine beetle)

i.

If creation is plosive

and death’s an archive

whose eye measures desire?

If ejaculate coalesce

and alphabets don’t flow

how can metamorphosis?

If lured across space & species

what distance binds

nursery and morgue?

While toxin resonates ambrosia

sweetens genocide sports

a forty-minute girdle

If homed in sapwood, basked

in bark’s pasture, can companion

cells right insurgency?

Tell: if scatalogical

tracings trace eschatalogical

signs:   the story

ii.

Whether Samsara breed illusion

or Hungry Ghosts are filled with transmigration’s

waste, repine

If design if chaos if history

if prophecy if scripture if heresy

if unholy babble say

While the masses had not hatched

the plot contrived to twist

until entropy’s blue dye

Were something else lashed to the mast

were the dancers not such hollow

tumescence

Had the epic orgy of pheromones

not flared, had vigil been kept,

the thronging lines stopped

Sing: while all fall down, while lame,

sans antidote, dote & lament

until the teeming rings:   despite

Pete Smith, born & raised in Coventry, emigrated to Canada in 1974. After a long detour returned to poetry in the late 1990s. Has published poetry with Wild Honey Press, Poetical Histories, above/ground press, W, Great Works & Oystercatcher among others; reviews & essays in Agenda, The Gig, The Paper, The Capilano Review, Crayon & elsewhere. He has given readings at the Kootenay School of Writing & at the final CCCP in 2006. His first full-length collection, Bindings with Discords, was published by Shearsman in February 2015.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan