Jake Syersak
From Notes to Wed No Toward
Preface to a Tone
The prefix of the world rests on the axis of the weird: what the molten yolk of butterfly told me does a yoga in the night's cast iron pan. This is a tremolo cleft in the treble's lips so often softens into this. Is it human to acknowledge the pivot of reality's prestige in the softening so often? What's the alternative? It's never been more apparent to me, the yellow pistil in the blackest of flowers. But no hole is atonally whole. The sun is as warm as a swarm of cigarettes; though ashtrays yell real Pompeii. How many smoke-rings until the smoking rings out "smoker" is an asking where experiments in inging have brought me: To a the-ing the thing.
Edge of Affinity
Why is the furthest distance from a pen always measured from the tip of the tongue? I want to be as self-aware as a comma seen from the off-shore of a spliced-together sentence, a swimmer in the distance taking a gasp of air in the lung-lids to remain a stroke, a pause, a dorsal away from on the ever: the precipice from which to believe what never makes happen. The best of belief sets a set of eyes just over a sheer cliff like a shelf, to peer into the oasis of oddity, ten fathoms to the odyssey of the absurd. In a finger the most divine atrophy of all muscles is the one on the verge of correcting the phrase: "I'm what everyone is on my mind"—before ink encircles every incisor to leave me gnawing for one last odyssey.
A Tone of A, The
This ear is a treble clef that makes an ampersand of text a hearing aid. I'm listening to the most amazing train—"a at the the the's at the a." It's chugging, the-ing, now finally a thing. I'm boiling down all the diagrams of clarinets, locomotives & wrenches in one big pot. All the steam is strung out like a chain of musical notes to reminisce about an iron horse. A stream of notes elopes at last with its atlas & presto: A new-found affinity for acoustics. A chugging thing. A the-ing loudly down the rails into I'm not sure what happened next. As if a text to wrench my thinking into some amalgam of a clarinet. When I write the word "blow" I'm thinking train whistle, but my ears aren't ringing yet.
Never Just Another Is Other
Why wherefrom then this urge (for example) when the sun shines to avoid calling sun sun surge? Why the also underlying orb, corona, aureole, or tournesol with neon cilia alight? Even a dictionary shudders down the spine at the very mention of the word, "world." L as existential incision, to resist the rigid dynamo of a singular lingering definition. The orbit groans. The spine cracks. Gears reveal a row of teeth inviting the invisible pull of biting as the word jaw becomes a degree of gravity invited as defined in the mouth. So sun, in defense of is, I adorn dawn with: "sky like an areola off-center." To catapult a beauty nether-wise into a neither here nor there. I know a drain where said drain finds form only in the avowal of what an uncorked faucet wills. & the swill of sun is shaving itself over the universe's sink, awaiting a groom. I'm one of the one's to espouse taking notes.
Eclipses, Eclipsed
So eclipses these ellipses something vibrating to birth. We have all the makings of pneumatics— of the rhythm of film—but instead burn down our projector booths with this: a linguistic burlesque; a whim, arisen as whispered pianola, unleashed as wild spermatozoa. We have sewn our hearts to these illusions to make it known: no is a toward to being. The notion of a feather enclosed in paper calls itself to a voyage toward an envelope; two legs caught in over-oscillation forget how walking allows a solo rotation of wheel; grass grows carpet where out from under the wilderness was dying; a mosquito, unnoticed, signs itself on the dotted line by the style of its input as a who through a syringe. I've given myself to the, to the-ing, wholly. Those halos, xeroxed, indebted to their own original logo; warped, warped wholly. The vertical pronoun of i slouches hard against a will. A ghost of ampersand on the inside coils. A caesura awaiting a flicked string will multiply one to a million lives in the elsewhere is another somewhere.
Jake Syersak writes: I am an MFA candidate at Florida Atlantic University where I currently serve as the poetry editor for Coastlines.
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