JOHN MARVIN - POEMS

John Marvin is a teacher who retired and subsequently earned a Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo. He has poems in scores of journals, and literary criticism in Hypermedia Joyce Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, Pennsylvania English, and Worcester Review. He has a chapter in Hypermedia Joyce, and h is book, Nietzsche and Transmodernism: Art and Science Beyond the Modern in Joyce, Stevens, Pynchon, and Kubrick, awaits a publisher.


He seeks to marry the experimental, non-narrative with the lyric and traditional in the manner of Nietzsche’s marriage of Apollo and Dionysos. He generally avoids accessibility for its own sake, and the prosaic personal story with superimposed line breaks that is ubiquitous these days.

      Dove Parabola

​if you’re waiting for an apogee
     waiting for a swimming around
     waiting for that geist to return
well ... you know what
     I don’t know that it’s going
          to happen
          any sooner or later time
as the man says, “ki-ki-ri-ki
               brings no rou-cou-cou”
 
not necessarily and perhaps
     necessarily not
considering juxtaposition
     can we appose
          particles and antiparticles
          images and mirror images
          directions and anti-directions
          time and contra-time
even when “grass is in seed...
     and the doves resound with chant”
          haunting murmurs of mourning
     penetrating without injury
the medium of their soul sounds
 
yet the crush of a world of arrows
     of more scattering disorder
     of memories past and an end in sight
     of a universe expanding swiftly
          dissipating into darkest voids
     beyond all our yesterdays
never amounting to a hill of beings
piston engines warming up for the last syllable
“stripes of silver that are strips
     ...slits across space”
yawning and lacking
     just lacking
          that’s all

​goslip

​dubious tales while sipping beer
in local pubs where
chatter from loose lips will
slip soporific drips of acid will
slip words with one sound
around to mollify the masses
classes who will not tolerate
egg head multi-syllabic
maniflashtoes
trippingly heard
heartily hated
diction of the clever
rumored to be gay
communist foreigners
disdaining rhyme and métier
disdaining little jokes
disdaining confessionals
and gaspirations
so stick your head
in an electric oven
and maybe someone will
care after it’s too
too forlorn timeworn
on foot after foot
a depression session
because chat the kit kat
coffee and doggerel
laced with wisdom
and impacted bleeding glooms
glossed and glistening
to every world othered
under the tongue
where a melting
lozenge lets
artificial sweetener
and soothing medication
trickle like painful time
whose last syllable
has lighted you know whos
the way to dusty
dearth

Looking for the Perfect Vibrator
            the woods are lovely dark and deep
            but I have promises to keep
            and miles to go before I sleep
                                                   Sigmund Freud

​rhythm and rhyme
rosemary and thyme
 
assonance and consonance
smoothing over dissonance
 
alliteration
staves off
... obliteration
 
crafters can make a poem glisten
with gadgets folks like when they listen
 
artists accelerate heart rates
elevate serotonin levels
as an Apollonian strain creates
breathless Dionysian revels
 
while dispensing with mechanics
leaves nothing but substance
confronting the question
of whether the object of the quest is to be
unearthing what reader’s want to hear
or probing language’s frontier

​     The Passion of Cinders

​He chanted the beat of a syncopated rappist
cursing the ravishing of the souls of his people.
 
He inclined to speak candidly
as was the fashion,
and it slid strain, I mean strait
from the subconscious,
or hitting about the primitive he hid.
Make that hinting. I’ll concentrate.
 
I saw him crossing, the weight
on his posterior, rapid transit
all the way. Did I mean speed or rapture?
A river cascaded down narrow,
rock-filled slides or talking in rhythm
each word a blow from within.
Or was that taking?
 
He bit into a plum
and the juice flowed out.
Some trickled from the corner of his mouth
down beside his chin
and he didn’t wipe it off.
 
Those two-edged swords
so sharp, so deep
forbid the subconscious,
the insistent, impulsive rapprochement.
He would skid down the ravine,
words as sapid as subtle sauce
on veal. Could it be frown?
 
We can’t, can’t sit even for a moment,
this moment, the one that just passed.
History lies hidden across the ravine.
He saw it riding a shock wave through
clouds of hydrogen and helium,
seeding them with heavy elements.
 
I can’t agree or even understand.
Is it rock and roll? Surreptitious?
Accessible only as that which
the keeper of secrets will permit.
 
I can’t count his destinations.
His complexion is made peach by reflection
of slag that glows like clotting lava.
The viscous fluid hinders
his precession to the last station
on a grid in the key of C.
 
I did a survey across the meridian,
through the disk on a three-pronged
divining rod along an electric,
unimpeded right of way.
 
It told me this much:
that he squeezes fresh grapefruit every morning;
that fruit juice is an invaluable part
of a balanced diet;
and that everything matters so much
there’s no way to ration it all,
or worlds to that effect.