But first these words, dear apologist

It is first and words

The cornered clergy balk

Failing to engage the most

private Failing to detect

what faith never returned

Wonderful heretics

Smaller prejudice

Derided by art

Even the ties of faith

Happy cultivars

Of unresisting fashion

We lament the decisive

and toast to the office of supernatural bends

Let us (quote) dispense with their heads!

As credit improves

few barbarians perform in light

Exposing the sands

Pleasure resembles

Hand to hand

What nature insults as cause

Believing only in feet

In the accurate exercise

To work the course

Immortalized in devotion

A providence to love

Deeply effected

Its horror ate that church

By shy, a leading gesture

Panels of lost truck. How belonging lands in gossip – cult of shrinking assertion. How we sit, with pets, in the triangulation garden. How there is no meadow where deciduous debate prepares for fall. How life pushed thru until its given frame bursts.

Impulse jumps ahead, incapable theatre fighting shy of each iris – a blur open against corrective vision.

Foreclosing any loop of progress, demonstration hurries us to an opinion. Her Portrait of Stalin sketched in stark lines. Each utterance part of the fabled body. Ahead of the opulent flourish, above an obstinate body, she bites her tongue.

Each occasion assists the great. Proof of proper nouns. Action in intervals, violence in the motion across. Impossible daemons spent in bishops.

It’s the same analogy to the same cause. Precincts liquefy in thirds, your distance banked to my bank. It’s the conversation claim on a considerable church. The undaunted portion is filth.

Century of exceptions (infernal alt)

Languid monsters

acquire hostile style

Arms insensibly shortened

Monks faint if obedience offends

Belief in the progress of verbs

In infancy no truth admits

Charity and moderation

By precise sums men

among causeways admit

propensities for greater error

Sophistry of the most vigilant

Secret bishops of the eminent stain

The Arboreal Class

Or how to embrace / brackets of telepathy

More more not mere mere
Vice president of vice
all the names
Director of habit
to recite the entire sonnet
Only one minion
My ROI is falling dear Shakespeare
as I say this

‎For lower center of gravity
for regions of flesh
freckles
‎bottom heavy mass
even the uneven ridge
Imperfections to enrich
each percent

House Unpoetic

Epigraphs suppressed

We want a poetry without words
Or words without poetry

Refusing to stay dead
Always more interior
Mannequins spelled incorrect
Even Cindy Sherman's apostrophe
was deeply disappointed

Footnotes baked in ‎
Contrary embrace
Utopian argument
For the other eye
for uncomfortable
symptom

At turkey shoot
High school roster
Ones own formative class
Expertise in hazing
Merely us versus them
Call it Heartfelt applause
but please "shut the fuck up!"

Lead singer's unconscious cakewalk
leads to the soft
sharps and the harpies
Collaged ambition
in the coldest place
Collection of cardboards
Rendered in chest hair
Acritical collage
@citylight
Signed Happy Camper

For an hour
I was super happy
Surface imperfection
Killing me softly
And get well
Drinks for a buck fifty

She was a poet and a fighter
Upside down cake
Stripped bare
Thus the righteous
Demographic
Exclusion whose roots
Pronounced boldface
Pronounced oneupmanship

Dear Rimbaud:
The price of transgression
is pleased to thank you
Spineless sting Ray
at house of barbs
Transcribed
indirection
for machine read glitch

Let us lacerate the venom
As if I were a fish
Pussycat of the sea

Man what kind of fish would I be?

Richard Mittenthal 11.19.26 - 1.23.16

Arbitrator Seeks Immortality:

Grievance Denied

Uncaged Animus

They have something to say but they're not saying it

Glistening in the reflective pond
I’ll trade you my incontinent missile
Rariform chump change
for revolting spam

Art wants its revolution
and eats it too
Indigestible jamrock
for EDM ravebot

Minimal compliance
at oppositional water slide
I shot Omar Sharif
on the Mondegreen

If that’s a wrap
Pick a card any card
Abhorrent full house
Fuck politeness

Fuck Cataphor - wait for it
Fuck Capitalism (the police)
which needs and loves incivility
Litany that interrupts

Flagon with the dragon
Mongrel collision
Complicit history
that delivered egg

In attractive black knee high waders
Mirrorphase revisionist
tests friendly fire
Solution that slit throats

We lived in abandoned shoe
& threw them into the gutter
Dear Resonant conditions
the flames hardly knew ye

Pounding lanterns I seize
The leisure poet
in Writing Class
Except for prose

Errata for sheep
for Rockford reruns
for Mannix and I Spy
for memory forms

Miscommunication
the only certainty
‎Reached for connective tissue
Cried like a lamb