Waiting

May 28, 2022July 3, 2022 Kevan Copeland

Waiting

The ceiling must contemplate spheres
orbiting my commotion.
Colleagues and I improvise
fluent choreography.
Patrons adjudicate; feed me
currencies I earn. Their appetite
for deliverance, I serve.

Yet performance doesn’t appease
past authority. Find something real.
As if what I balance were intangible.
Others say: find someone nice.
But I lack credentials to satisfy.
Sure, I save for building—but can’t buy
guys I deign to like.

Once, after unmasking, I exited
to moonlight in front; someone behind—
heard footsteps accelerate
in pursuit of my tips. His pacing dropped,
but I never stopped a life
of interminable racing—
when I’m not waiting.

Radishwhip

May 21, 2022July 3, 2022 Kevan Copeland

Radishwhip

A froth or a slash?
From a flask,
foaming slaps
taste, splayed
off the tongue.

Sensation is searching
for shores
in the skull. Past flora
flickers a brain,
flashing the pan.

Fahrenheit
sizzling, thirst climbs
to press prickly lips—
gasping for water
in cacti kisses.

Vegetation
is vascular rapture:
sailing on blush. Waving
splinters the grin:
ravishes!

As A Novelist

May 14, 2022July 3, 2022 Kevan Copeland

As A Novelist

I control words coerced into being
more than myself. A concatenation
of pages, books, brains: manipulation
is my expertise. I shape your seeing.

I appease inspiration with my clutch;
whether tomes, music, lives—I have a touch
of kleptomania. Reined in my fist:
the fluidity of a pugilist

Dancing in a pen. Personality
disorders, so my borderlines are kept
writing, as I create reality

Conforming to my vision: great. Except—
buried in my lather of character
is a girl, and I cannot extract her.

Dissolving All Distance In A Single Sonnet

April 29, 2016 Kevan Copeland

citylights2

Dissolving All Distance In A Single Sonnet

From inside, I view, from behind, your body

On the balcony, your look enwrapped by city-span,
the rising CN Tower lights coveted by Brooklyn eyes.
We understand; my room and I invite you in:

I twist myself to tilt your sight, and spill my head across the ledge
and onto sky; then begins the body press, the lips to neck. Citizens within
our borders wish to mix; immigration laws do not exist

Between our kiss, or in my bed. Among the threading
in my sheets, the strands you leave are all I count. They recount
my fingers weaving to your head, and how I watched it facing

Out, in poignant glance. That locus, under microscope, could explode
to where, with such device, you search for me
upon the slide, scrutinize, then conclude: both man and place reciprocate.

Toronto wants you. So do I.

La notte

April 17, 2016 Kevan Copeland

lanotte4

La notte

Love’s interior, cruelly dimmed, appears
in reflections. Vivisection won’t show
emotional artifice or its tiers;
skyscrapers steel up from such pathos.

A sterile Milan, within dilettantes,
breeds ennui in a pair. Their forms divorce
among the revelling rich: without want.

Like rivalling youths aborting their force,
the brief freedom streak of a skyrocket
dissolves. Above idling idols, the sky
fills with colour from a single silhouette,

Then the substance of it. Morning light spies
two cores at opposite ends of an eyesight—
denuded by dispassionate white: the night.

Richard In The Orchard

March 1, 2016 Kevan Copeland

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Richard In The Orchard

Author: he has slipped
a manipulation of the mind; mine.

Past rows that glow, he walks
where abstracts contract and harden
into facts—their magic
more exacting than this sifting shape; the fantastic
now practical.

Chernobyl harvests: inedible, they stir
regard—carpenter or god,
engineer of clear parts,
their maker appears.

Words on interiors cannot be
seen or shared;
images are louder. In these trees—
here, is power.

And you, looking
back at my branch, view
Impressionist reds, ripening
notions: disnebulous rubella,
their vermilion skins value

yielding their paints
in waves of rosacea.

This poem appeared previously on the Very Nice, Very Nice blog under the pseudonym Anthony Zanetti.

Interview with an Immortal

February 13, 2016 Kevan Copeland

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Interview with an Immortal

I don’t live the finite life, but life revived
within each mind. I’m not a mind, like the kind
I entertain; but when we meet, we share
a brain, where I’m alive, but not contained.

My planet is an active mind, aroused
through time; an ageless host, I know, but note:
parasites don’t enrich a life; I give
back what time invests. Though I have no flesh,

I have a form, and a depth; I just need
a being to give me being. When it leaves,

My end is not a death; just a break between
the lives that give me mine. From a line
my life extends, pulled by needle through each head,
and hurts: Sublime—suturing immortal life.

This poem appeared previously on the Very Nice, Very Nice blog under the pseudonym Anthony Zanetti.

The Red Desert

February 2, 2016 Kevan Copeland

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The Red Desert
*after Antonioni

There is a mind inside an island. By the brim

Of her shore, a boy culls from the sand; a ship,
Unmanned, scores the gulled coast
While cormorants repose on the glittering rose.

From the ocean, Poseidon is goading the shore.
Drops spray the boy’s back. He is shelled
To attack; his searching turns in; becomes

An internal thing. Friulian lyrics
Smooth crests from within. Who sings
Dialectic, in dialect unseen?

It is the island; it is everything.

This poem appeared previously on Cosmoetica under the pseudonym Anthony Zanetti.

Bright Thoughts From a Rothko, Untitled

January 16, 2016 Kevan Copeland

rothko

Bright Thoughts From a Rothko, Untitled

I only felt like half today;
I’m too lazy to cogitate
a name.

Every paint is just shade.
Every day a day

Off. Posh galleries pay, anyway,
to do what I shirk.
How their minds work

To explain, to conjure,
to endure:

All that weight which paints store
as colours cohere
their thoughts and their forms.

What is paint for?
I like it flat

As a man on his back.
I can’t help those who can’t see
why I’m great. On break or vacation,

I only stare back. Unrealizing
ideas, I ask:

This poem appeared previously on the Very Nice, Very Nice blog under the pseudonym Anthony Zanetti.

REM Aneurysm

January 7, 2016 Kevan Copeland

amethyst

REM Aneurysm

As a roar of petals cores into sight,
the cherry bouquet chokes the arciform street;
a red sea hardens to an amethyst plate.

This poem appeared previously on the Very Nice, Very Nice blog under the pseudonym Anthony Zanetti.