DAVID BARATIER's poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Denver Quarterly, Jacket, 5 AM, Phoebe, Fourteen Hills and other journals. Anthologized in the forthcoming American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), his collections include A Run of Letters (Poetry New York Press) and The Fall Of Because (Pudding House). An epistolary and prose novel, In It What's in It, will be released by Spuyten Duyvil next year. He is the founder and editor of Pavement Saw Press.

SHEILA MURPHY is a frequent contributor to Slope.



(THERE IS NO SWING)

There is no swing to nothing.
Traipse equals, more like it.
Glide resists the only butterfly ensiloed.
Endeavors one by one enumerate the face of gravity.
Wheels sit a while then square off with the curb.
Doesie-doe really only like this for eternity.
Nobody goes to jail when they go home quietly.
Whenever a rollover captures the creative attention, a geometry emerges.
Well, sometimes, send me a pack of squares.
Circle the rule of thumb.
Rubato used to be a first name.
Not that I can't believe you did this speech.
The solo audience appeared to have been stupified.
A meerschaum lah dee dah restores the hammock to first state.
Who's smoking what these rabid days?
This last show of volition pampers absolutes in a manner that discerns me.
Failsafe waters are the place, the only place, not to go swimming.
A quarto of nothing on the left.
Pints have been erroneously dreamed.
Quail shatter solo frames for youngsters to grow into.
Gun laws apply only to muskets.
Domo el roboto Mr. Rubato.
Inside well made metal stables sheep are multiplying on their own volition.
Whose idea is the welsh rarebit anyway?
Prognoses stitch campaigns into a range of probabilities.
Vote for me, for weather, for the soon repeal of all inferno!
Session my smirk mid morph.
Lore wanders off, and then . . . .
A foreign word infests plain language.
Great speeches of Lincoln are shelved in expectation.
Soma places guilt's greater will on natural webs.
I waited months for someone to show who had seen the play ending.
No one had the heart to say in the report it had not ended.
Parameters consist of speech with lines.
Go ahead and blame the shrill soprano in the first row.
Have you heard the one about the shuttlecock and the parade of pawns?
Tenor vehicular homicide one more time my lovely newscaster.
Glamor ceases to repay me for my worth.
The last person to speak their own words is a rotten apple.
Why is hearing called a faculty?
Simplify the damages, then pass.
Amplifiers wrinkle suppositions.
Spence recently gestured a crowd that I was perfect.
Doilies on the head mean they were Catholic.
Next to the welfare line is fishing a likeable boy.
One diary, pretty much the same as any other.
Here the version tapers off to fantasy.
There the folklore has elapsed.
Scores of remedies have crowded shelves that barely fit great speeches.
Meaning the commas chose to pass, and here we are again.
Commandments promote good health during cold season.
Watch them.
The nerve of that guy with his hello Dolly Madison my cupcake.
Affection passes often as true love which smells for what rise.
Answers crowd the page with unasked questions.
A simple yes arches to the perineum.
In the cold breathing moved about the group.
In the heat, the mercy kill stood absolutely still with tenure.
A swing swung over the porch.
Wood means obviously something to him that transcends what wood has ever meant to me.
Watch this lighted lamp be framed.
Impetuous return of serve means prompt hearing of advice.
Lightbulb them spiraled tubular filaments until snapped.
Take a picture and be done with it.
History remains in present tense.
The watchword is emote the by and by.
A metronome of nothing on the right.
Conductors tend to prance, dwindle, remunerate their druthers proudly and profoundly.
Half of the bell curve sits where we can see it.
The other half a true curve.
Let me straighten my thoughts to look presentable.
Don't bother the early Phylogenes obsessing on the get.
Echinacea promotes the writing of new commandments for the winter solstice.
Who earns what is more the tune to the matriculant.
In the way we are walking to move a standardized full potency.
For what altar is the rendezvous prepared?
A seeker after truth is starting to make sandwiches.
Dalliance parlays one rafter after two.
The balanced meal was well instutionalized.
How do you like them potatoes?
Grammar, too, according to the ritual.
Be broad on this.


***


Chaperones escape their housing. Prompt and indefatigable pressures
crawl from under a surprising layer of skin. Whose bombardment should
be shirked first, the machine RAM or the quiver's? Au naturel,
delirium presents geometry in view of chandeliers. If I remember right,
clairvoyance is your pitch. So quantify skin's squared-jawed
effervescence that perspires signals different from rapture. Someone
dances light years. Eeks out a lilt of laissez-faire to muster a
solicitation for equipment. Hello my equipment of many shares believed
to be owned until a half light of sundowning revives the residentials.
The place of supposition multiples until our centers are convincing in
their strengths. Mathematical resilience flexes so we can admire it in
unison.

Where does emulation come in? In the way of bearing material to the
witness of a core with light years shifting outwards into the errati.
How plural are we? Blanching is a thought. And weeds that shake spokes
into windlift. Poised to have been seen by handmade periscopes made with
fancy mirrors. Your submarine of unseen mass which really is a child
whose head rests underneath a couch during hide time until that concept
is understood. Distinguish empathy from action. This is my
understanding, take with you the section which is implied unfounded a
name we each bring to a table in the buffet in the best
sense of the cafeterias city, we eat from in oracular underpinnings of
mouths. Delphi technique was used around the time of post-Pony Express.
Now shrill speed results in glut of information, almost as practical
as dry rot. The pitch of clairvoyance moves to a method of mediocrity
because there is no tenting the blame on that which points or gathers
outrage. Limited time furnaces accept offers of bandaids. When someone
has come clean, avoid natural intercepts of interrogation. Small of my
back, incessant lull, tomes to absorb remain in place and unidentified
behind sparkling glass. Speaking of which ad libitum becomes modicum
until the difficult lift of morning a natatorium of intertices. In
slices, a restless white house of wait blanches the cadaver's vertebrae
before insertion into the donee. Have you seen my new housing. This new
house of what you want movement used.

All mine yours we need time run over do time now some call not fast into
head fires time now. These taken slow injections of resolution someone
elsified into the restible. Come clean ought thresh toward a timid
hold. My anchors painted porcelain are now less white. See stains
inherit the moist earth? Crowbar baby lags behind the place beneath the
dome. (Ad)ministration or (ad)mission working counterclockwise? Is
this your first? Motion sickness claims to be hereditary and resemble
pitch. Brocade matches voice of the narrator, strong and swilled. A
whiff of pearls redeems the impulse to possess. A posse might proclaim
to be an afterthought. A sheriff runs. A sheriff runs for office.
Cover. Slams on brakes. What element in our discussion will be primary
over the long haul. Surely not fire. And earth so close to that. What
remains of air not previously sullied by an inference or conversation.
Ought stains, unbrushed fur, a tarred and feathered coat of arms.


***


Side effects brung our ideologies to fall on.
Somewhere, a root cause disintegrates to nonparametric whimsy.
While we all fall down to say you know me is not so turn, that which
tells us our tales in a broach folds.
My only glyph goes typically unrecognized behind the scintillating damages.
This squaring of tellers bildungsroman.
The square root litmuses novellas.
A package stoved finger.
Can you distinguish furnishings from tapestry?
Deliver this my metabolism to a more sensible argyle coloration.
Truced to have been seen as chartreuse mapped in Chartres.
In the aftermath of London calling someone appears on the doorstop collect.
A tattered prayer of heuristic pointings.
Fast forward from here my loving movement along figures.
Stasis puzzles over what next.
We will do inextricateable deeds, oh the revenues we will exploit together.
The masthead will climb down to paper level and a papalcy will deletest.
An experienced rafter of cash to spend with noone to take from hands.
A puzzles stasis over where fitted.
Margins bask when unprodded.
Coquettest ferns in oblong quarter light.
Pentangles rallying omnipotence to figure hunger.
A tapestried furnish a scoce of brems liquid along the sides solidity.
Quiescence shafts no person's number on caller identification.
The sign we were born under was flashing in dimunitive regularity the longer noticed.
Plasticine injections make her stance erect.
Shalimar, combs, weevils, and half shells defeat mimesis at the midpoint.
Nouveau weeds make practice perfect.
There is a pre-answer for the Highlights essay which stunts growth upon realization.
Shin splints litter my garage.
Strings glide forward where the dustbins are alert and brining.
Ameliorato sounds harp juxtaposed with mezzo soprano against organ tones.
Vibrato worth takes tide off lives concentric and decisive.
Soft spoken heterodox engraves our attics with a flounce.
Antiquity rings "twahst" when no one's rinsing any of the heat.
Things stored in irregularity are brought forth in an imitation of storing.
Tomorrow wings its leveraged spread by chewing off what it has not yet bitten.
Our breathing irregularity moving sideways.
Perhaps this is why Whitman's brain was dropped at the preservatory.
Capillaries shelved for drying mayhaps evenly.
There withal this mercantile posturing of cure.
The focus wanes, the leaves, the hospitality, the claims.
Antiseptic offerings very soon thereafter indicate no one had left the house.
An enduring quality of surety will be tested unconventionally in a few tellings.
The first rendering is considered a trombone; the second, any hallmark greeting.
The people who create new buildings - architects and engineers - have a
language all their own.

Hey, my sweet little pop tart of longing.
In a town which has since folded into the liquid decomposition of architecture.
Does the name Patsy have any special meaning for you?
Send for me my fruit basket.
Environments shift manners into taste until the episodic breeze sleeves by.
Gesticulated understandings unmanifest in fortunate fortuity.
Tears released ten minutes at a time prove grief beyond a shadow.
If you need help defining these words a glossary will at all costs be available.
Cadavers make cynics seem floored.
Ascertaineth these words naught? Then appertaineth in saxifragaceous
lambling thy cadaster adroitly!
"Piffle" was the word he used.
In economic brackets the young professionals embrace.
Parsement, the activity, a ream of paper grammatically poised.
Looking for a numismatic administratrix who coins good phrase.
Serendipity as shoes exactly the size that they were giving away free.
The population of Durango's swelling and confused as cameras still rolling.
Dry your infant eyes yourself, and I will warm you.