// Michael Ruby
 

 

 

From Elements

 

*

Forceful prerequisites

Haruspicate and ignore the plantains at your own risk
There’s hell to pay and purple earrings live in the hyacinths

Moving arguments on behalf of Mitchell and their seven fairytales
A penny for your heartaches and a mathematician for your hydrangeas

Measures sudden and phantasmagoric
Brethren pathetic and heady

Presentiments stimulate an equal and opposite reaction
Fasten your regulations and pry into the very fruit
Portions of megacycles
Portions of dukes
Popular megalomania and all manner of handsome pilots

Irregular and omnipotent
Monumental proceedings for the edification and vilification of asparagus

Coda

Minute hostilities impregnate insouciance with a pride bordering on love, a mastery presuming to understand, a lapping as of marked participation, cantankerous, sweaty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*

If only houses rise up to pursue hearth stones fold
                         batting hold North

cesium hurt
but Nostradamus needed to eat the lead

                                                                                                                          Fragrant
prestige fills the mouthpiece of low places beyond practitioners

            still chills hostlers
                                              supersonic world form
                                                                                                 forthright unity

                                                            torsos stay manufactured
                                                                        tones in place
                                                                        harp persevere


We are prepped to change lackluster lancing and breathe water upon homespun meeting of sky without preconceptions about even Wackenhut mountain masterpiece of fortunate evacuation from size


                                                                                                           precisely takes up
                                                                                        reassessment is part of the sky


Around tokens of forgiveness
Above homeopathy
Bye practical emancipation

 

 

//
Michael Ruby's first book, At an Intersection , was published in 2002 by Alef Books in New York. His poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in the print journals Lungfull!, syllogism , Fell Swoop 's Brooklyn Stoop issue, Lost & Found Times, and The Torch ; and in e-zines xStream , Aught , Big Bridge , La Petite Zine , Sidereality , BlazeVOX, Castagraf and Unpleasant Event Schedule, as well as in single-author issues of Mudlark and Poethia .  He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and works as a journalist.

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