Steve McCabe - Radio Picasso

Radio Picasso

Praise for Radio Picasso ”Most poetry nowadays is overwhelmed by what it’s supposed to be. Steve McCabe’s Radio Picasso bashes itself against the reality of things; it expresses sensation rather than cheap emotion, and is as intimidating and unpredictable as a country bumpkin with a sawed-off shotgun.” ~Len Gasparini
	Eurydice with High Heels She gave herself comfort with an infantile ritual Inviting me to brutally occupy her blanketed cave And within another circle, her broken childishness. Her skin called me deeper into her dark forest My primal breathing broke the surface Heaving solitaire / captured / conquering. I was divining the landscape of our desire Shattering the points on a compass Mercury flooding a stairwell. She sat in a tree growing roots of wet hair I fed her her own brokenness She asked for more. I said, “… at the next moon, When we descend again.”	Red Abstraction Bittersweet angel, Decreed to exist barely visible; a geometric conceit; Selecting the finest sugared fruits From a long lost tree Invisibly subdivided by years. The motion of his hands picking and choosing; He knows what to look for, The moment of readiness is long living, Even when he peeks around the corner, A whirligig reminder: How red abstraction becomes, When the abstract has been lost For a reason too bitter to taste. The measuring and positioning of the vortex in season, Striking some of us down like a red flame – How else can an invasion succeed? Only bittersweet roots can lay the groundwork For make believe branches And a rope swing, blowing in the wind, Waiting for its passenger beneath the tree Fruitlessly heavy, with an eternity of weightlessness, Snapping the rope. Invisibility subdivided by years Is how red abstraction becomes; Waiting to push a child on a swing. Waiting for laughter over his shoulder. An invisible offering of sugared fruit From the tree that is and is not; The angel that is an undoing principle Remaining fixed. While gardens relentlessly Edenic Appear only to disappear Beneath the weight of years. Photographs of invading red flames Exist as a portrait of love Proportionate to losses given, Erupting in season, Invisibly three dimensional, A sketchy outline in white Around sugared fruits in the long lost tree Growing old in its shadow. What was has become what is, Becoming what shall be: A trinity cycle of angelic calculation Whispering and unsticking – The shattering sound dividing What has ceased from what ceases to be. The bittersweet arrives with passing years. Emotions neither too harsh nor too sweet Finally swinging on a wooden seat. Beneath the branch, Pushed by an invisible hand.
	You to You My hand covers the rise of your flesh Containing – how should I say it – The sun within the moon. As if weary fish eager for evolution Happened upon rooms of dry land Behind watery doors. My body heat performs the ritual of alchemy Or perhaps dowsing is a better word – Conducting you to you. I am an abstract ellipse One aspect of the curve you are traveling To yourself. I orbit you and you stick to me Like gravity drowning what’s inside your chest Unseen doors open and close. The secrecy that nature is hinged on Electrifies my hand With the memory of your memories.
	The Prehistoric Films of India They knew how to create a box of fire while inside hands of ash clapped in paradise. Fossil Fish in a coma Slept through the ice age waking Beneath clear water.	T Because you lived many lives by the time you were nine Because your language is like Japanese painting and the paper Showing through Because you disappear wearing white into the architecture of secrecy Because your voice is a drop of water on a leaf Because you breathe the inexpressible and sift it like flour Because your lips work on me Because your logic is rifle fire Because I swim in the blood of your unknowing Because you hold a pencil like it’s your finger Because you stand on a cliff and feel the wind On my face
	Global Shift I spit gravel from between My broken front teeth And said, “I never knew you kissed so bad.” Mother Nature shook my hand Giving me a big grin. “That was just a warm up.”