Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Mark Brunke
39 years old
Mark works in University level administration. In his off time, since 1983, he has published works of poetry, criticism, made short films, and written music.
Artificial Light
Under the sweet desert the anniversary impulse is bred into the soldiers heart... in time nine beats for eleven measures and self dissappears into the arabian rhythm.
In rhythms and beats the orange sun rises and violent its violet edges say good night and good morning to insurgents and surges of soldiers playing and plying the dead for mediated affirmations of each other's causation.
Under yellow sodium artificial light death came. To each with ecstasy, sadness, passion and numbness; To each with pain, forgiveness, and hatred.
Two televisions sit facing each other, transmitting in different languages, filling the air with sounds mixing together, playing to an ever deafening crowd.
Weapons of Mass
Inhale sunlight this tired mourning, the body of our Presidents' afternoon is on the news, some early Christian song to greet the rising Son and his soldiers of fortune, aloof in their desert adventures.
Green child, red cake arms: all head lines and pixilation disintigrating in the camera touch of your death.
A gun under your left eye, your head rejected backwards in remnants on your father's body: all to your sister's flesh, raped and wounded and bound in fire.
A voice rises muffled in imitation of the geiger counter measuring topographical hate, commercial breaks, and rain delays.
The voice lowers, escapes, and stomachs the inhumane of our American cousins.
The Rain of Illuminations
Under the Empires of the Sun and the Moon the Earth returns its grey everything raped.
The dolphins sounds are squeezed from their lips that breathe one last and return their clay, everything ashen.
Soldiers rations return the day, everything illuminated now fades.
What seemed to be truth was deceit and what was truth lays dead forever abstract to the West.
Mothers Go To War
Mothers go to war their hearts extended in the sky
as their only Icarus goes too far in the song of some black eyed sunflower lie
wax wings melting in the dust
and mothers go to war in their windows and streets
hearts beating loud the drums of broken wings
Death Speaks to the Remainders
They are instead
Living people in the war memorial. So high above they would die If they fell in the moat. They get sprayed with gold And dropped in by helicopter And asked to be as silent As the dead. We are the remainders of their sacrifice And make sure they have Friends to talk to about with
The days before Everything died.
We have invented darkness Which is pasted over Their fading memorial eyes. We peel off our fingers Taxes and speeches And digging under the lid, with a dull-edged coin, We clean the sleep out Of their eyes. Spots Move in the void of their White blood.
The spots return to darkness in some predictable algorithm, validating the process.
We have trademarked Grief, and made a drug of Famine. We are a God With cold lips and in our War Everything dies.
Homonyms of the Dead
What war bore both in ore and reward
to Halliburton ash flesh colonies
has left upon me the poetry of cynosure.
I see across the sea and am warm under the same sun, yet I wonder are we all hearing in the afterwars of guns the same snap and crackle? What is this sound from a casket today? A homonym it must be, but I doubt, for surely no whisper from a collapsing chest could be discerned to be some illusory and profound thanks.
Orpheus After the War
Orpheus after the War was a thought upon the Beach, A veteran with a dispense and a reach In reminiscence. Love is gone.
If there were no war, Milk would drift down your song book, Lifted from sweet grass And inhaled Under the dandelion sky.
Our early March was A snowflake under an evergreen aching backwards And arcing sideways;
You moved like glue On a window screen.
Where can I go now But to the memory of A driftwood beach And this comfort of ink?
In the forest of a thousand trails, the tree of the Unconscious shelters the goddess, Kneeled in a psalm kennel of adrenalin. Water and foam move over the shoreline And inhale the roots of wood And leaves of arms, corpse songs now among Vibrations: the sound of the ocean.
That din is the lonely Hum on this crowded Waterfront. The sky is birds And gasoline, The city but crowds And magnetic density, The water some eternity Disguised as affectation by A shelter and can of hot dog soup Disguised as home.
Playing Possum on the Sidewalk
I came home across the river of your body lightening. Black hair in the breeze, just five feet from me.
But it's just you walking beside, walking on by the grey window.
The possum isn't, it isn't playing, laying there dead in childbirth, babies warm against its cold belly. Little pink cigars freezing to death beside the white hair.
Except these small deaths freeze me now, lock my mind, feed my isolation, lock my trauma, fire my stopgap. The war goes on, and it runs across my life.
Close Distance
When will I come home And see that lamp in Your flickering room?
What will you do, home From the war? Sunlight And summer ore, or Bus stop and creeping Mourning through the night before? What will you do, Bandaged in your skin?
I will drink lampwax And leave terracotta dust, My faith and wonder withering in Shadows on couches and grass arenas; Until a semblance of my substance Emerges, resembling enough, Just enough encaustic dust, So you may trust your memory, Unlock the door, and let me in from this close distance.
Watching
The war falls around us and I love you, still Night falling in A
Despair as I walk Through all the years of us
Polar distances In lunches and Easy conversation, Riding around the desire to Come into something Exquisite,
That desire to Be lost in your soft muscle, Eyes lost on the driftwood Curves of mucus turning Out into soft tissue, Where you turn from pink to brown.
I remember you even as I see you, you in my room, our one moment alone, the sunlight running evening shadows across the street as you turned and leaned against a cabinet, your eyes drenched in the light of our polite words, we never touched.
Highlights in a long year of five thousand days.
War Runs Across My Life
This digital world lingers and does not bring us closer together.
I only see my self with the help of telescopes. Every love song reminds me of sadness, every sad song remind me of a plastic radion. When will this end?
We are torn apart, slightly separated by the presence of conflict, bombs, some scholar might say the sweep of world events; yet it is back to the feelings of distance, the desolation
that you are not here and may not be, that causes an unspoken anguish I can share with no one.
And they say this digital world brings us closer together, "they", hmmm, who? who? And yet when we talk, I at night and you in the morning, message by message, it is only the distance that is illuminated, a trembling, quail distance.
I see these threads unwinding finally, back to a river in Vietnam, a bear from a mountain drinking in a cold river far to close to the mouth. The sunlight breaks the horizon, water turns to desert, the sand coming out of your brown hair.
The Sun Kings
When we were
air foil and turbulence, sun kings upon dust covered hills,
a green machine of slow gyroscopes and black magenta metastasized.
Our words slowly roll up the beach, salmon poetics and dried tubes of cellulose. Brown pieces fall out of my mouth. I look with red eyelids, backward, a gilded survivor. The guilt survives, connecting string legs to fake hip bones. I unfold, unmarked, unremarkable.
After My War
There are widows walking Around with guillotine Eyes, their western wires Wireless by the window Side. Rain falls, trains slide.
There are motherless books, Blank except for feeding Tubes that illuminate Illusions about time.
There are wounds, begging in Lonely bandages of Skin and dirty blankets.
There are cold fingers in The distance of my future.
