Patrick F. Durgin is the author of several chapbooks, most recently the free e-book Sorter (Duration Press, 2001). His poetry and critical writing have been published in magazines including Aufgabe, Chain, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies and Rain Taxi, and will be included in the forthcoming anthology Cities of Chance (Rattapallax Press). He edits and publishes Kenning and lives in Buffalo, N.Y.

Next Best

The Beginning Of Is
Is In Things By Their Right Names
Names A Paradox So That
That Paradox Redoubles Very
Very Much
Much As One Qualifies A The

The Next Best Final Perhaps Arc Before the Morse Is
Is Not Clever

To Outboard At The Source
Nope Not A Lotus

Continue

Thirty Voracious Muckity-Mucks
Tangle Clutching Twice The
Genitals Behind It A Deep Culpability
So Tough Is Sobriety Talking
Be There In No Time

A Beast A Box Of Gears
Lively

The Heavily Cancelled Light Of
The Moon Is All That’s Left
To Daunt Us This
Gets Its
Stubble

What It Must Be Like It Must
Be Like With Intentions To Be Legible

Thorns For Left Semantics

Realtime Theater

If Love Were Anonymous
Love’d Be A Capacity
In Which Knowledge
Serves

I Think It Ought To Be

Summer Is
Upon Us
You Can Peel It Off

Dark Relief

In the extent to which - in a single but not singular abutment - that reveals but is less
          revelatory than just fortuitous



just and fortuitous - we’re behaving just like animals



in a "moment" that is the adumbration of its antecedent - a supposed lapse but just a
          momentary lapse of imagination



because we have - if nothing else - an insatiable (but dormant) taste for such "things"



the way we want to record even our nightmares - so they ruin the same day twice, secondly as

          we set about retrieving them from our "memory" - but never happening upon them

          that way



it’s all in the delivery



left to what is right is anywhere as I would say - when you’re around everything is described by
          it - a certain perfect blunder toggling and tussling the effort of that awareness



the spirit unless the letter - we do the thinking that never gets done - otherwise we’d have to
          hate it with our freedom



the dangling scrape of shopping carts on recycling night - no purport



you get on my nerves - but that’s where it counts



by all accounts - the distraction’s the emphasis - the determination the distension - the agony
          of it all - a pride to die for



if you will

Relay

Color Music

But if a light head is a symptom
of suffocation less a consensus
to content us
ice floes than
ambience

listing brings
what carrying
takes

tremor to thought
and scores things

so now
or figures as landscape
and stunning a while like so

a phantom fear of sobriety
makes us hasten we are here and I
have just arrived dualisms in praxis
come to a sheer flammiform techna

and hollowed ground is something audible
learned amnesia or slim chance we walk

both counting from one
etymologically we are congregating
and many stranded in attendance

ricocheting
in the cottony twilight
lamplight echoed
episodically
the vague tarnish of the marching discontents
wafting in columns
at manholes

and the panoplies come uncaulked
in the calm flirtation
the art of distance traversing itself
a scumbling
design war

a hostage to a
bleating bourse of ambition
the brittle tourniquet of history
selecting from one
the barbed pores of heritage

straining for semblance
in gutbucket times
we are syncopating types