Two poems from Ray Succre

This is the Spark


Early by a dawner's clock,
with sleep to come where sleep should end,
I am bound all licked by a pastime become time thief.

If I reach your trickling alarm without shut eyes,
in that you rouse and find mine red,
as I sit and bloody my head with the ever-leaping story
of a character in a game on a screen,
fetch me from this pleasurable invention.

Start with profanity, or call on guilt, use nudity or bacon.
Up all night, I'll haven't a care; turn it off or take over—
only fetch me and send me on.



In a Pit of White


The cold year banked in less-lit December,
stumbled past, wings straining and indignantly spread,
straight into the snow—all it could do to stop.
Of all the things it could have spun anew,
thought to mention in passing over to next year,
this year chose to impart nothing but frozen children,
back from the white and stuck for long spans
in an un-sunned, wishful house.


Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and son. He has been published in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. His novel Tatterdemalion (Cauliay) was recently released in print and is available most places. A second novel, Amphisbaena, is forthcoming in summer 2009. He tries hard.

Two poems from Ray Succre

Fulgent Men


divide themselves young on a thermonuclear
regain of slussy or cwat or punt or tritch,
obscene term for female genitals,
with a crescent wrench hostility,
a gain of signatures from unfortified ponies.

Or as they think.

Deep retracted from this expansive show,
I've learned to hold hands, clean or vulgar,
hands, domestic or dizzying, rid of glary bits
and brimming with notice, and divide myself
to tandem memory, day by bang-up day,
as goes this less sleepy, stellar sort of me.



Dead On (Indirectly)


Contents_Hot thinks well of himself, per se,
and thinks you're the virtue circular
he met through an online dating mess.
You should know, Miss_Gourmet,
Contents_Hot spends Thursdays dunking
his costumes in Tide for the churner-paddle,
eating microwaved sandwich pockets
(the package warning from which he
designed his longstanding screen name),
and then gesticulating wildly with his genitals
while reloading downloadable content.

You will likely find in him a grand monologue
of dorkdom from feverish, ongoing isolation.
He needs you, you know, a poise of parole,
and would treat you to his restoration,
should you greet him more than the once,
tonight and blind, to the misjudge of pictures,
should you become happy with him and decide
to quell the chessboard of your seldom pleasing
days.

You're no gourmet and you want to be in love.
He's an intuitive kisser-at-the-door, you know.


Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and son. He has been published in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. His novel Tatterdemalion (Cauliay) was recently released in print and is available most places. A second novel, Amphisbaena, is forthcoming in summer 2009. He tries hard.