Poetry by Ken Taylor

                        Ron Gilbert CC




X outside the apportioned field

back during webelo days 
before merit loops & emblems
on sixty-four opposing squares of faith
we never learned to use a knife
             too busy being cut by the closed game
by lions & tigers & bears & wolves 
being loyal to not letting us in

placed by a scheme of uniform as delivery
for kerchiefs & slides
for earning badges to imply rank & file
              official blue with button-flap pockets
we wore in secret         revealing more knee to none 
when ankle & crew were fixed by families of the den

tracking the chair of shaping eccentric plots
accused of chemical sway we knew the cost
of attacking quick in a battleground of self          as vizier
              taking the antipositional path
by bending notes to not a note
ever known before in making note of sound
             where we were the utmost but not the tallest
             where the church was rich & marked as chattel
conscript or serf depending on the ground

touch-move ruling was the game of seeking
yet another gay as fuck space the                stuff of
actually being named to become further
              unsex us & license our roving hands
to tie the knots for slipping or razing
in more moves than the sum of all grain 
             fleeing the heaves of sly attending
to the interwoven pack inside our form
             & internegative thrum of our forked pain

sweet angel pie set before our lowered eyes
be our procurator standing before a lower court

to scumble the verges of our song with coats
of care                           making it easier to hear
while we tweak the twig at our nose & sniff 
perfume or fumigation to see if we’ve been seized 

not undone but done with undoing
not afraid of taking flight past tests of dear
compression to reach light
                            to scout good splashdown weather
                            to look up & say shah met

Ken Taylor is author of "first the trees, now this" (2013), "dog with elizabethan collar'"(2015), "self-portrait as joseph cornell" (2016) and the forthcoming "aeromancy garage" (2020). He is the founder and editor of selva oscura press.

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