What was our poison touch, of palm lines
centred on hands, opening chords
into the body, incisions rent inside
like wreathless layers of skin?
A glorious kinetic estrangement
feed-back loops speaking in tonality /
urban reconstruction: organ runs, skronky sax,
industrious clarity / at the edge. In the frame,
increments. And
some time later, New York City,
alone. Glorious / audacity.
I saw your shadow forty feet long crossing
father demo square to come up stairs
after the ritual throwing up of food
I tossed down the ring with the skeleton key.
Enactments between us always began with something
breath/ less. Taking starkest energy.
Was it you then,
dressed in a white tuxedo? Art student
of midnight, your ironed shirt, clover-patterned pants
sitting angular at the edge of a conceptual stare,
a concrete floor, iron bed-sit, installation.
Being, the notion of prayer,
or, in waiting at an abutment outside the Mudd Club
or somewhere else , in another outfit,
I remember your troweled performance on a couch
in the sprung rhythms of acid house.
Such memories / walk / me waking
forward
to specular lipstick on pale skin,
circular meridians drawn in cups
from a river.
To tie red hemp rope around your
waist, tautly hold down your thigh
to hook beneath the back of knees
for levitation, a shuddering radio static
meeting clustered mind, gathering up
in suspension’s glove for inertia. We ache
in de-evolution towards ancestors, the
awesome incisive markings, spine of
your bridge, arched, offering, gravity-less
spectral juxtapositions: wigs / wraps,
buttoned / in collated
collars; marginalia /collective sighing of electric
guitars in process /a novel /
pages with annotations, yes, without
you we are in for a long triage.
Hand over hand, climbing over
indelicate industrial clamor, unrolling
typewriter ribbons to erase propaganda broadsheets / smear
the news and various
other kinds of puppeteer topographies /
with spilled black ink blood.
Wandering / steps behind a
procession. At the parade grounds of immolation,
we sit on our knees, for hours / Try to
stand up straight with
a wishbone lodged in the prism of
your throat, already broken, outmaneuvered /
we were plates of glass, shattered
fragments, separated from everything.
Sometimes /planes take off from here,
on time. Even cauliflower
softens in the pan. You were once
serenaded by electricity volts, hand-held by numbers
of your fans who came to see you perform.
(new stanza)
Now / (note): I serenade your memory.
Dictate stenographic emblems
to exposed toes. I
want to shake in crescendo, howling
in a complicated realm of teeth.
Programmed noise for synthetic generative
chatter.
Titled, Music # 4: It is /
so cold outside. Never forgot
your urgency /
The predilection / to wander.
Robert Frede Kenter is a widely published writer, visual artist, performer, & publisher of
Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net) with work in over 200 publications published or
forthcoming including: Watch Your Head, Harpy Hybrid, ballast, winged moon, ABR, storms
journal, heavy feathers, petrichor, Cable Street, Burning House, Pissoir, Lost & Found Times,
Blood & Honey, Otoliths, Paragraph, The Prose Poem Journal etc.. In Anthologies incl:
Capitalism is a Death Cult (Sunday Mornings at the River), Speaking in Tongues (Steel
Incisors), The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press). Interpoem 1 & 2 (Sedserio), Glisk and
Glimmer (Sidhe Press). Select books: Moon Writing (with Catherine Graham) (Ice Floe Press,
2026), In the Blueprint of Her Iris (with Vikki C) (Ice Floe Press, 2025), Father Tectonic (Ethel
Zine, 2025), Audacity of Form (Ice Floe Press, 2019). Robert was guest editor of Secrets and
Lies (July, 2019) at Burning House Press and has lots of other projects on the go.
Soc media X: @frede_kenter, IG: icefloe22, r.f.k.vispocityshuffle, Bluesky:
@rfredekenter.bsky.social.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 