Eclair of the Heart
a man overcome with emotion cannot gloam
or gloom his way home …
a snail occupied by a whale cannot prove
nor dispoverish a dish of sardines …
a sack on a madman’s head serves as a hat
dashed by the drive of who’ll keep him alive …
a doom served up by a saucer of milk heals
the welcome of wolves at his doubled
doorway to stay the night heaved by the blitz
of battleshod crumbs at the dumbwaiter’s
beck and call …
a posse of weak-kneed jehosophats splats
head-on with the long grin of one who
knows the most is missing from his puzzled
periphery…
“gotcha!” – get me closer to the gotten
of godspeak as the freak pries back
his laughing garb to lodge a complaint
at the ain’t-been-there-yet …
no solvent nor kosher dill whistle will fill
you up like an eclair of the heart …
Sauna of Soothing Blues
The drunken dice pursue their final tumble
in the first of many tosses
What’s left is a past a paste of former selves
in the groaning dog days of irrelevancy
These weeks of rewind sure stymie a spring-forward
doorway through the clues of an isolating loop-de-loop
The gift of a peapod knocks at the guarded gate
in a Sauna of Soothing Blues
Prosy rosettes pose a wetness a shrewd meander
a coy coriander dipped in the inner inkwell
Spontaneous nerves in a slow syrup – the gaining
of eclectic touch in the much that there is
Vodka Victims
Vodka victims avoid the ovary
melancholy of wallet-sized apologies
When seven rolls a tollgate of telltale felons
in a flash of uppity passion
I string the ring of pithy possibilities
in penniless squirts of action
Votive channels waver in the windy scheme
a thing of barely the brass knuckles
on his fingers
— by Mitch Corber
Copyright© 2021, by Mitch Corber. All Rights Reserved.
Mitch Corber, multimedia New York City neo-Beat poet, is a 2020 NYC Kathy Acker Award recipient for career videotaping and broadcasting of New York’s teeming poetry scene.
He’s videographer-director of NYC Cable TV‘s weekly series, Poetry Thin Air (1989-present), and its vast online Poetry DVD Archive, thinairvideo.com.
His two published poetry books are Quinine (2009) and Weather’s Feather (2014). Filming poets for many years has contributed to his evolving writing style.
His poems have appeared in many poetry journals, including BlazeVOX, and Blackbox Manifold 4.
Corber, a founding member and live TV advocate of the innovative art collective, Colab (Collaborative Projects, 1977-1986), is also is a noted filmmaker of “John Cage: Man and Myth” (1990), “Fickle Foliage” (2012), “Leonard Cohen Interview Trilogy” (1988-2013), “Nomads of New York” (2016) and the autobio “A Young 70″ (2019)—viewable online.
He is recipient of a 1987 NYFA grant in the field of Emergent Art Forms.