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A weekly video reading of poetry by the poet.

Barrier Canyon Style
by Mike Jurkovic

“I will astonish Paris with an apple”
Cezanne boasted.
And I thought
“Okay,
I’ll try a peach.
And if not a peach
A pear.
And if not a pear
Then what?
Plum? Night shade? Tomato?”

If art, like water, like war
Has no constant form
Then praise be
The nomads of Barrier Canyon,
Ancients chewing
Red ocher juice
To spit the Holy Spirit
With tongues afire,
Onto the climbing sandstone.

Imagine their need to astonish, to express,
Then bring into your own:
Each day a mountainous palette
Blushed with blood,
The tincture of your heart.

Couldn’t I
by Mike Jurkovic

Did I have to pick
Such a crowded field
To play in?

Couldn’t I have been
A luthier or smithy.
A craft of hands
Not language

Couldn’t I just build things?
Standing solid
Instead of this cinereal
Landscape of ideas
Wreaking the array
Of orchids asunder.

Wallowing in affect,
Couldn’t I have plumbed
One board against another,

A bed, a chair
What the village needs
Instead of my petitions
Nailed to the wall.

East 138
by Mike Jurkovic

Through our debris
Our children walk
Barefoot in barrios
Burdened at birth,

Cry the cold china
Billboards in Harlem
East 138
I still call you home,

Turn back the promise
The premise, the menace
East 138
I still call you home,

Abandoned like babies
Burnt and begotten
Over a river of peril
Standing alone,

At the crossroads, a beggar
Of jade and Jehovah
Hustlin' for handouts
From shadows long stilled,

Spit out the devil
The demon, the donor,
The monster, the baby
The shrill of the dead,

Run the cold plasma
Over hordes of the faithful
East 138
I still call you home.

Matinee
by Mike Jurkovic

The Quest and Quagmire Theater
Is an oddly secure place
To pass those travertine moments
Outside the food chain

Where Express Autopsy
Won’t find you
Hoarding half-priced popcorn
At the boho matinee.

‘Malachy Bends (The Suffragettes Lean)’
A cautionary of surveillance,
Unspools the shadow play

No one wants this artsy shit!
Give us scandal! Celebrity ass!
The dogfight over Tehran,

Give us this day
Our final directive:
Mission Accomplished
Sis Boom Bah

Dry
by Mike Jurkovic

The sleeping coed
Missed the storm
The hundred year storm
To be exact.

The one that took
The dorm downriver,
Where I stood
On the perimeter

Dry as a bone.
Separating plastic
From paper
Glass from tin.

The PR minister
whistling fait accompli.
Insisting the river
Was dry

The floaters only basking
in the latter sun.

The call of distress
a dark new music.
The modal minor
Of dinghy motors

Called to clean the details
Until the barges
Took the land away,
Spit shined the golf courses’
Premium ocean view.

The sleeping coed
Missed the storm
The hundred year storm
To be exact.

Tell Them, My Love
by Mike Jurkovic

If they ask, my dear
Tell them I died behind the wheel
Waiting for the light to turn,

Waiting for the ass ahead of me
to discover his left from his right.

Tell them, my love, I died simpering
While the road crew widened thoroughfares
Smoothing the finish over my blackened heart.

Tell them, my love, should any be inclined to query
of my well-being, that I’m buried with the odometer,
The universal gear.

Tell them I withered in the heat
The stewing froth of motion and mediocrity,
Prey to the rush and clatter,
The zooming zoom zoom of death.

Tell them, my love, I died in love.
With you, with them,
Despite the miles between us.

Wishing I was home.

3,000
by Mike Jurkovic

I was in a wild barbarian area
Doing happiness research,
When a storm surge rose the dead.
3,000 coffins uprooted, evicted,
Adrift on the crushing tide.

Marking the animal calendar
Stroke by stroke,
The dead flotilla surrendered:
Name, rank, serial number
Rounded smooth. Disappeared.

Its skeletal remains
Intervening like the shadow
Of a godless moon
Commanding no tide.

Where the entire tribe has fallen,
Wasted on the goods
Stolen while running blood,
Awaiting the flood, the fire
To bury it all again.

In My Car of Feathers
by Mike Jurkovic

Amid
the great handling
of cash

My car
of feathers
blew

Parallel
the big screen
As the former

led the latter,
And the smokers
missed the good stuff.

“It goes so fast”
The slack eyed maven interred,

As to the whereabouts
of the 9:15 susurrus

Mission Creep
by Mike Jurkovic

Lengthened by a
Six percent drop
In daylight savings,
Any encounter
With the shadow
Bears fruit.

The strange sticks I stack
Begin to take form:
An atypical salute
To Dewey Decimal.
All knowlegde
sub-dividable
by ten. As if
street smarts
extended beyond
Verbiage and volume.

In mottled parentheses
My fellowship begs,
A time released
Decibal splash.

Art cannot save us.
The world needs bridges.
But our core of engineers
is hollow.

Top Hat
by Mike Jurkovic

Some days
Are just
Conspiracies
Against me
Personally.

And I’m not
Being paranoid
Considering
All the cameras
And comrades
Calling

By land
By cell
By sea

To say
It’s all
Gone to
Shit
In a
Top hat

And could I
Drop
Whatever I
Was doing
(Which was
Pulling up
My pants)

To dispatch
The chronic directive
And heave
The acoustic shadows
Over our
Appraisal

Why I Don’t Buy Newspapers
by Mike Jurkovic

White beats black
Stabs brown
Kills yellow.
Man rapes child
Shoots mother
Boiling baby.

Senator fucks page.
Starlet makes millions
Portraying mother
Boiling baby.

Bombs shatter innocents.
Nation eats nation.
Tonight on Reality
Cokie buys a penis extension
Hah! Hah! Hah!

Baby births baby
In garbage can crib.

I’d rather die an idiot
Then a genius of their making.