L.R. Harvey Poetry

Until We're Caught The doubting man finds comfort not                 in scientific verities or beefy arguments that tout themselves as firm, but oddly                in the morning constancy of horny  squirrels circling the willow tree                 behind the picket fence. You see,  he holds a yet obscure but tangible                conviction that existence must resemble such a circling, a daily new but known                 pursuit of what is surely lurking on  the other side just out of reach,                 a chase where distance waxes each from each but never will collide.                Now if it’s joy or truth or just a bite of squirrel ass he isn’t sure, but as                to merely the existence of the chase  he’s found a subconscious certainty                 that lets him sleep at night, at least until he wakes to slowly shuffle                to the toilet bowl where he will pray his prostate once again                expels an insufficient dribbling,  go

Warm Enough I thought the sparrow fluffing up  his feathers on the oriental fence was not a fluffy sparrow but  a microwave, his twitters slicing quite invisibly as gamma rays  throughout the yellow breakfast nook, and I got shuffling up to see that no, my oatmeal hadn’t cooked sufficiently, but evidently something had, despite the spitting rain.

A Fluid Surety The unabating ebb and flow has shown itself as crippling, strong enough to down the tallest sureties and slowly settle them in silt. It's evident there is a certain  sense in which we understand that what is fluid overwhelms the set and thick,  and yet today Alaskan trolling boats  will max capacity with tourists snapping pics of what is left, with tourists droning on  about their trip to Arizona in the spring, where open-mouthed they feasted on recordings of a trickling voice eroding what they thought they knew of how the canyons formed. Incredible, they'll tell their friends, proud to share their new- found certainty                          which now will never fall.

Last Night The night went on for days it seemed, though not this time from weathering a whipping existential easterly  while tethered to a pillow case, or even drowning in the racket from an overnight construction  of reality as loud as Billy’s roofers  down the street. No, it started more   unheralded, when right at 10:00 I came  to find I hadn’t done the many things that needed doing, and feeling suddenly my inability to meet the undefined criteria, french-pressed myself a little blend I could have guaranteed was advertised as having no caffeine. I worked a bit to pacify this sense of falling short, till falling short I utterly abandoned ship and floundered to the living room to watch an episode of Selling Sunset ,  a show I genuinely had no interest in if other than to keep my mind distracted from the painful burning in  my heart—it comes from drinking coffee late at night, that’s if we’re speaking literally

Once the Poem Ends At unexpected times the world wears a violet hue, when all we labeled sure takes on an infant strangeness long since lost. A word, perhaps, begins to sound absurdly alien, a vocal smear of paint that you are shocked once signified your middle name, or ears take on a comic quality that till that time had quarantined itself within the card- board covers of Dr. Seuss. The hardest part of these unprecedented trips across a foreign  hemisphere is not the trip itself, but then returning to articulate precisely what you saw to those back home—they tend to say things like “I know exactly what you mean!” before proceeding so absurdly far from what you mean you simply nod and pray their tongue falls out.  So please, my friend, say nothing if I tell about this current shift of mine, where now it seems irrational that vision is restricted to a single focal point. The way that everything beside this word is only blurry

A Little like Constipation Backed up entirely with something weighty in the hollow part, something surely big enough to fill the bowl  and then the world, one starts to feel a certain desperation as they navigate their daily life. “Out out, damned spot!” as Lady M. expressed the sentiment,  and I am such a one who understands  her inability to cleanse a thing, to rid herself of that which confiscates her rest  and weighs her down like iron shoes.  It most reminds me of the prophet who  relentlessly implores a turning to  the light, who rips his scraggly beard in anguish for the lost until he finds that sluggish orifices grow so tight  that nothing enters in regardless of his sweating rants. Like him, I’m left to either sip a cup of coffee patiently, praying for a miracle to come my way, or push until my head explodes.   I've found, the way the weary poets have ,  that pushing tends to do the job quite well, if I can be co

Another Thing Unsaid Leviticus 8:37 I bet you found exactly that which we've been looking for: answers to perplexities or maybe numbers to the unsubstantial i in math. Did you at last discover why to this our endless sojourn, what it is  sustaining us with rain but driving us to drink the ocean dry? And surely it  was awe-inspiring there, enough to shift your psyche momentarily if not enough  to send you raving mad—how classic of  Him—crumbs and crumbs and crumbs we pick and put in baskets with our thumbs. Just tell us, man, just one more verse! Or did you say it best with abstinence, resigned that even priestly words fall wholly short?

Centurion Like you, I too have tried to nail it down and hoist it up, have hoped to see it framed against a Galilean sky like Prufrock’s patient etherized upon a tabletop. I’ve known  your burning need to know the shifting thing that dances round the corners of your mind in spinning parables, that twists about like women at a wedding feast with endless wine, impossible to look away, impossible to still or reason out. You’re not the first to scribble something final on a plaque and hang it well  in sight, hoping to conclude this quest to label that which strangely pulls your spirit up but calls your body down, down to eat with prostitutes and all the lepers with their pussing wounds about the walls at night, the tramps who circle round the desert wells like feral dogs to feast upon a wounded man.  And no, you would not be insane to listen closely to the wordless plucking of your soul, the strings along that tightened harpsichord now harmonizing