Gregory Betts is an experimental poet, editor, scholar, and professor from St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. He has published five books of poetry, including If Language (BookThug, 2005; a constraint-based project of 56 perfect paragraph-length anagrams) and The Others Raisd in Me (Pedlar Press, 2009; 150 poems plundered from William Shakespeare's Sonnet 150). He recently published a history of experimental writing in Canada called Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (University of Toronto Press, 2013). He teaches at Brock University in St. Catharines. Boycott is forthcoming from Make Now Press in Los Angeles. His website can be found here. ---------
Morphings
You Fit into Darkness
you fit into me
into stasis into darkness
like a fishhook in substanceless blue
into an open eye an arrow
like the child’s cry
in the cauldron of morning
lake nibbles on a lost subtle metaphor
like a crying in the streets
like this photograph of me
retreats under this wet crypt
Let Us
Let us go then you and I let us bleed then you and I
shall we go then you and I shall we move then
shall we go then you and I shall we move then
you and I
they do not move they do not leave they do not run they do not scream
they do not move they do not leave they do not run they do not scream
then shall we run then shall we spread ourselves out against the television sky where the evening lifts like a ski soft caress of a hill like a saint spread out against the summer sky
shall I compare thee to a summer chaos spread out against the teaming lands and the thorned fields with the old sublime prophets wringing lilies from the acorn
will you lift your head in wonder at the naked generations at the sick men making magic with their humble tools and their chance at the yellow smoke at the window panes at the weak men making magic out of something underneath the self-same sky, for I am sick of love
will you run after me
your love better than wine
embrace me, your hand
under my head
shall I say shall I shake the darling buds of may shall I by chance or nature’s changing course unaffected by the Muses’ diadem shall we dance like the classics in paraphrase?
I am a worthless boat my ancestors bequeathed me no wide estates to which I shall go no rich blessed keys no sense of no no derangement that could outlast the blessed little moment
when I consider everything a perfection held in a little moment
hollow made yet reverberating like stars in
secret blood pacts against this sullied night
I engraft for you something new
for here and for there
and for which we do not move
Po(u)nd
petals on a wet black pond
frog faces
splash apparitions