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When my wife went away I began to devolve.
Before your very eyes this Ghazal will devolve.
One night at O'Malley's led to three days at hers.
I smoked while she worked until we had to devolve.
On patrol in Kabul, he wonders why he came.
It takes just one wrong moment for shit to devolve.
Marty didn’t make very much of a corpse
Bones and ash mingle with dirt to quickly devolve
Janie and Lanie and Beth schlepped to O'Malley's.
They dawdled and waited for the night to devolve.
Half of Grade Nine blew the Language Arts assessment.
It took but two hours for their morale to devolve.
Jess went flying from her bike and into the air.
Leaves met her back and she felt her terror devolve.
Sam casts a virtual shadow across the net.
Sun-down — til sun-up he lets his free time devolve.
It feels as if we’ve always been talking this way,
Winter to winter, hour by hour, seasons devolve
You find this man without his wife stark raving bored
Talking mindlessly, our conversations devolve.
We could walk up and down Spring Garden Road for hours.
It’s the evening's prerogative if to devolve.
The crows and the voles and the carrion know it.
Our days and words and thoughts have only to devolve.
There were so many nights where so little happened.
Walking home alone you felt your mind might devolve.
Every hand reaching out and every cry knows it.
We can only be counted upon to devolve.
Yet finally you find you have to sleep it off.
Matt's middling dreams seem to whisper"devolve, devolve".
A god without a temple in the rain
Beholds even leaves tremble in the rain.
Exiled from heaven, he walks the earth, trailing
His sodden wings, an angel in the rain.
The sudden torrents overhead recall
The rivers of Eden, the jungle in the rain.
Sometimes, I sit with a cup of tea by the fire,
And other times, I gambol in the rain.
Like monkeys, words caper just out of reach
And participles dangle in the rain.
Still I build castles in the sand or air,
Alas! — and still they crumble in the rain.
Amid the clouds, the poet glimpses the muse
Like sunshine or a candle in the rain.
The worry-machine of materialism
Lurches cliffward on fuel of empiricism.
Master and slave take dictation from the same dog,
A rabid cur sometimes called capitalism.
Nor does philosophy exist, being fallen
Into self-fables, intellectualism.
Can hearts anamnesically learn love-sickness,
Self-consumption, via such consumerism?
Tomorrow we will institute the World Center
For the Imminent Destruction of All Ism.
For now, semi-audible complaint will suffice,
A heady, modern luxury: criticism.
Nicola is not bird or cage, light or spectrum,
But something invisible trapped in a prism.
I never dreamed I'd end up, in 2024, in People magazine —
a publication I confess I've never read, People magazine.
In waiting rooms I meditated on a wordless staring wall,
while others, also waiting, thumbed through People magazine.
I'm told it shares the secrets of celebrities of every sort,
makes them just a bit more noted, to be in People magazine.
Full of stars and starlets — I love the darkest night sky
vast beyond its furthest twinklings. People magazine?
What's bright on TV grows still brighter, celestial bodies
burning telescopically from the folds of People magazine.
I've avoided such exposure; flew from shade to shadow,
moved too quick for paparazzi or People magazine.
Will I be here at 80, gazing flabbergasted from the page;
hermit-thrush caught an instant inside People magazine?
Dust mote dictates empyrean conspiracy,
Ice sings antarctic black metal conspiracy.
It hurts ego to hear cosmos is one big tree
Infinitely ramifying conspiracy.
Witness thought's betrayal of thinking's own body,
Keeping secret everybody's conspiracy.
Who is my only and non-essential essence,
The halo of this event as conspiracy.
A single anything spontaneously kills
All chance of there not being a conspiracy.
Individuation glitches every system,
Endlessly out-conspires every conspiracy.
Ecstatic mnemonic paralysis seizes
Nicola's heart in the sweetest conspiracy.
Jesus never asked me to be thankful.
I am far too busy to be thankful.
You've got thanks aplenty, but it's nonsense.
I'll show you how truly to be thankful.
Step within the frenzy of a lifetime.
Life is far too crazy to be thankful.
Let your moments tarry not on thank-yous.
You've too much to carry to be thankful.
Gratitude's not only for the grateful.
No one's able solely to be thankful.
Martha's working; Mary only sits there.
Contemplate her fury to be thankful.
I am not a grumpy ingrate humbug.
Yet my heart's too frumpy to be thankful.
Be my witness: gladly I would thank you —
if I had a proxy to be thankful.
Please forgive my madly wrung catharsis.
Would you want me sadly to be thankful?
You said: Value mercy, justice, meekness.
Why'd you leave me freely to be thankful?
Jesus, help me turn — return — to you, though
still you've never asked me to be thankful.
Children learn that a word repeated loses meaning, begins to waver semantically. In Matt Stranach's ghazal, "devolve" undergoes the same process. Start with a somewhat unusual word that names an abstract process and place it in 15 contexts (shers). For me, this ghazal conveys a strong sense of the continuous precariousness of our lives and of the unidirectional arrow of entropy toward randomness and loss of meaning.
People conventionally complain about rain, at least people I know. Yet I grew viewing rain as the occasion for a day off from work in the fields. It's raining as I write these notes, a misty rain with an air temperature of 48 F. Chilly and wet. Stephanie Jones' rhyming "temple" and "tremble" really seems appropriate in this context, a rhyme that itself rains. This ghazal neither complains of rain nor celebrates it: the ghazal presents rain, sher-by-sher, as the context for a marvelous variety of scenes.
"Ism" speaks, as the Quakers say, to my condition, being familiar with the "worry-machine." I don't see the purpose of these notes as annotation, but you may want to check this entry in Dictionary.com regarding the first line of the fourth sher. Taylor Graham's "Famous for What?" matches Nicola Masciandaro's "Ism" well. These ghazals define points in a field of attraction/repulsion, a field we all share, even if we don't get our pictures in the papers. (Or want to!)
Perhaps we learn our identities by breathing ("conspiring") together. Textures of abstract words wedded to concrete ones also breathe — together or apart. Joel Neubauer turns "thankful" on its head, or inside out. The "What Would Jesus Do" meme seems to have run its course, exhausted its merchandising potential. We do "breathe together": air entering and leaving billions, trillions of lungs on this planet. "Turn and return" with the air that passes in and out: Who breathed the molecules I just exhaled? Whom should I thank?