March 11, 2013
A Wonder

One life is far too few to find the end,

where what’s left may be evidence of

a genesis.

Five thousand lives; one million lives

are far to few to be enveloped

by the entirety of history,

painted and woven into our night sky.

                                                        …What subtle game to play in a stark

                                                          November rain

What boundary is there just beyond? What boundary

do we infinitely encroach?

Or do we pressurize until implosion?

It is indeed a subtle game,

and is tasted on the lips

like words that struggle to

have an effect on a reader.

                                                                      See that furthest space, twisting?

                                                                      Look twice farther and wonder.

Til it is sung in poem from memory,

as study papers can be so,

a wonder is all we can afford.

c.2013 JTG

March 11, 2013
I feel the splash of a million lungs,
gasping to stay,
and begging for a taste.
      Hours come and go; days come and go; years come and go;
     legs and feet come and go; neurons come and go; cells…

I feel the splash of a million lungs,

gasping to stay,

and begging for a taste.

      Hours come and go; days come and go; years come and go;

     legs and feet come and go; neurons come and go; cells…

February 28, 2013
But a Dream in a Room in France

What if it all wasn’t there?

But a dream in a room in France

beside a fire and a wooden table?

The foundation of the machine

is believed linear, continuous

—steps on steps, without fault.

Gracefully spilling ink wells

onto documents for all to see,

to approve, to confirm.

What eyes speak to thought,

and from thought to conversation,

is but a whisper from a demon.

What if it all wasn’t there?

A veil so thin it persuades us it’s thick.

But a dream in a room in France.

Certainly certainty is likened to gold,

but a brash sound it bellows.

Absolute nothing

is a universe of intelligibility?

The days birds can’t even sing the thought…

What reason belies a mutiny

of this strangest kind?

None is rightly the answer.

What benefits belies a mutiny

of this strangest kind?

Few is strongly so.

But a dream in a room in France

—denying matter defeats the mind—

“I have a brain.”

c. 2013 JG

1:07pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZhTOGyfCBvHq
  
Filed under: poetry poem philosophy 
February 17, 2013

February 12, 2013
Steps

Isolated in a box

of your own self;

Isolated in a city,

surrounded here.

But

     I

       should

                be

                    taking

                              steps.

Its fiendish—stay hidden and never love,

or dance and be rejected. 

c.2013 JG

8:14am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZhTOGyd_LmQf
Filed under: poem poetry 
February 11, 2013
Letter heads at UWO. 

Off to the right is a dorm being evacuated.

Alarms bells belting their shrill laughter.

One is a statement of the present;

The other is a burnt toaster strudel.

Things exist as a blanket woven together intimately.

Temporal moments spill significance and concept onto portions of the blanket, and the stains become descriptions. 

Descriptions are punctuated with characteristics, and they lend understanding to any outsider.

There’s no reason I write this for you today, but this temporal moment will ripple to you at some point in time, you’ll understand what you think should be understood, your actions will describe your moment with my words, and that description is a field of study.

JG 2013

Letter heads at UWO.

Off to the right is a dorm being evacuated.

Alarms bells belting their shrill laughter.

One is a statement of the present;

The other is a burnt toaster strudel.

Things exist as a blanket woven together intimately.

Temporal moments spill significance and concept onto portions of the blanket, and the stains become descriptions.

Descriptions are punctuated with characteristics, and they lend understanding to any outsider.

There’s no reason I write this for you today, but this temporal moment will ripple to you at some point in time, you’ll understand what you think should be understood, your actions will describe your moment with my words, and that description is a field of study.

JG 2013

February 6, 2013
Afternoon in the Sun

I don’t recognize the voice anymore.

When the war broke the streets I killed it at the door

Breath left the dead and settled on my chest

Now every time a write a song I hear it in my head

In my head I couldn’t get away, everyday

In my head, I want you all to stay, everyday

In my head, I try to find a way but I’m lost

Everyday I searching for a way to pay the cost

But I can’t

So I scribble on the page,

God I’m fucking sick of making minimum wage

Because it feels like I’m stuck in a subliminal cage

What little it pays is brittle but the riddle gets tamed.

Fucked tamed, I want to see it go buck wild!

Running through the city streets goin a thousand miles

Breaking through the median, medium is concrete,

Roll, crash the car and then write until Im hungry.

c.2013 J.G

February 6, 2013

Headlights melt into the darkest blackground

while the siren sounds wail lowly.

A city made of stone, trembles, barricaded by the lonely.

Willows turn to salt

and dust your TV dinners

so that they taste just like

the road they travelled on.

Sooty, black magic magnolia,

married with your blood stream.

Heroin heroicism, harried carriers

and endorsements.

Red canvass corsets strangle the rib cage

of the downtown debutante.

Layer after layer, tighter and tighter,

vision fades,

the city wakes,

and nothing makes sense.

c.2012 Josh Garrett

February 5, 2013
Asleep

I’ve lived and died before birth

in a simultaneous instant.

I now live inside a dream

that lives inside of a boy

that lives inside of me.

I find myself sleeping.

I mean, really, I find my self asleep.

c.2013 Josh Garrett

February 4, 2013
Clemontine

I settled for tea, as coffee was unavailable,

and spoke to the dust in the air over a cigarette.

“A clemontine smell, the sting of citrus, is just as  potent as ink.

When its shell is penetrated; when our eyes sting

and our mouth waters with anticipation; when we

crave to see the colour of its flesh and to taste what its life has produced;

we have stained our atmosphere with its glamour.

Be it movie titles or fridge-born self-confidence

you see the ink;

be it novels, poems, paintings or Kraft Dinner cooking directions,

you see the ink;

be it t-shirt tags, laundry detergent, or remote controls,

you see the ink;

we see the ink, because the ink is like a clemontine,

the ink is like fruit

There’s only one layer to cut through;

one layer to sever violently until you can paint the prettiest things.

We cut through the silence, the haven’t-said-anything

and then say something, and the world is born

in a billion colours,

in a billion ways,

peaceful, warring, equal, or burning.

Like the flesh of a clemontine, the ink can rot.”

Just like that, my coffee and my cigar died.

c.2012 Josh Garrett

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