Matthew Cooperman
Like Pirates

They came in gold ships and stole to remember

The eyes of the cheetah or a causal mythology

Coffers and cleaners and workday workers

Of the sensory plexus and the movie plex

All abducted     rewired      seduced

Dreams picked clean of the memory of home

Eyes to keep widening the aperture of collapse


A new materiality in the placard of line     fishing

Some say contempt for the pressure on syntax

The line     a life line a blood line a chalk line

Thieves of the moment stricken with lack

Woe in their mouths     in their glozening nets

Lack will not save the best animals from millennials


Would thou become teleological wood

Meltdown of forests and a long-dredged meadow

Desert to deserted as room to a view     viewing

We had faith     they were peaceful     not a religion

Went down to the ships     set keel to breakers

Little did we know the disease was not foreign

A sailing planet     a failing logic     westerly winds that bore sheep

Heart disease     proverbial slumber in the form of an orb

Planetary evidence      losers     we'd love to be right


Of deepest water     close-webbed familials

Not technology per se but empowered islands

What can’t be taken and what can’t be shared

Kingdom     Continent     Kimmerian Passage

No man alone what someone said      someone said yes

Went with them     went mad     like an American Bengali

Like an American Linden     the trees still fell


Fell     hill of evidence     the leaves stored in amber

Tell tale     winter     white flour     sweet wine

Wild gyrations     industrial house     idling or idylling

Gone from the stream     wept and rent     stricken

Offered to die     was lost in storage     could not swim


Go back to the first pyre’s purpose     limbs

That we left there     vein to a view

Beyond the bitter sword a better sheath

The past not gone to Pluto but made up continuously

Cadaverous brides     bronze lance heads     collapse

Or retrieval   the Thebans say     we are lost at sea

Pallor upon us     men     women     and beasts

Matthew Cooperman
Children of Woodstock

chance is a funny thing     we cannot control

ourselves     sex     flowers     the stereotypes

     of life and death     lost


in rusty factories accelerating towards ground

the place we stand on     a turning frown


      a Turing frame    the consequent frequency

republics us all     famously the recluse

     refuses     people know today deaths of friends


and old family almost immediately     a screen

     when you’re dead you’re not old     the Civil War

becomes an implant for observations on race relations


              nothing’s settled     a man who advocated

              caning for adultery gets caned for adultery

                    condolences     a book reads a boy


              while sleeping     jazz is a songbird

                    sucked into a jet     everyone expected

              suppresses who they are


we march toward the beating heart at dawn

              no red rose in all the gardens


              they call it the nervous system     an angry man

looking for years     the source of his anger

     finds a cow     we march toward the beating heart


brayed art     to vine the plant between us

     what is love            persuading money and resources

for my people     nothing’s settled


              the consequent frequency hides sunlight

and flowers     a repetition famously sex


              the men stricken by frozen ideals

delivered to the children of Woodstock     nevertheless


       coffee     babies     eggs by helicopter     sunlight still

on their faces their arms     how guitar     how avoid a Civil War


we enter by sunlight on Chance’s Day

celestial objects     babies     Latinate names

     astrology arcs the turn          yet


everyone suppresses who they really are

             a window winks     a widow

a grown man reads a book about a he he isn’t


they call it the nervous system     sense

              and senseless     arguing air

                             can a void be dispossessed


a factory can

     a chance & a hope lost in industry


we march toward the bearing heart

          a red rose in mind     eggs     flowers     sex

     in the morning     clear skies above


the songbird in sunlight     a tuned repetition

              washed their dishes     drove their cars

     republic’d us all despite


did not brush their teeth     did not go to war

     the hippocampus is


a part of the brain connected to life and death

the cow     in a field     lowing us through


           stretched their muscles     ate their eggs

     earned their wings     bore consequent angels