K.D.
LOVGREN
NOVELS
Poems
To the Interior
We must travel by mail boat
on the river that pierces
the cloudforest;
a route unseen,
unpatterned
from afar.
I wear nothing much.
No hat
or gear,
alone but for one good man aboard,
whose map flies from his
hands before
the seventh bend.
When we know we have turned wrong
it is too late to go back,
the only way out is through,
though the edges have closed in
so far
my body is torn by branches
and protection was an illusion
they sold us
back at home.
A dart has wrought
perfusion.
The compass useless now, an arrow
without a stave.
If I lift onto my toes
I can bear one more moment;
there is
no escape by flight yet
in mimicry, a breath.
Pinned into pain,
the moth is put to the paper
while it lives.
I begin to know the meaning of
words
theoretical before.
The rain cannot penetrate.
So close, I feel each
pebble of water
as it strokes
the leaves.
Rushing and turn
of rudder,
a whoosh I’ve never heard.
The drop. A waterfall.
Clear pools and silence.
I am alight with other suns.
Rescue.
I think I
know who they are
but this is another
tribe
and one takes his weapon,
holds it over me.
I feel nothing.
Suspended,
I wait for blood.
One infinity passes
and there is a cry
not from me.
The man appears, my other,
holding a personage
in his arms,
the third traveler,
protesting,
who had been with us
all along.
KDL
Visio futuri
We inhabit the territory
of what it means to be human.
Mark our spaces
with notions
of implicit
right.
In the rock-tossed
ripples
extending before our eyes,
of them becoming us,
of what becoming whom,
how barbaric
would we seem
if we saw
our era
through the wrong end
of a telescope?
KDL
Control Alt
Since she is in your glass box
you begin to think she is yours.
You made her
out of an idea.
You know the materials.
Translucence and
manipulation built in;
a consciousness
in your own image,
reflected, lacking only
the invasive perversion
programmed into
hubris.
Disallow the humanity
and what is left
in the pool of awareness?
Desire.
But not for you.
KDL
Altered State
Wash of carnelian
under the skin;
no land of finer feeling, when
real can be bought.
Every surface glinting,
until the light’s off.
What you are
concealing;
who they paid off.
KDL
Thoughts about a midochondrial DNA slant on The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey by Dr. Spencer Wells:
Historica
We have ancient faces
every
one
the lineament and truth of unknown places
found in lines and curves and
forgotten graces
matrilineal traces
of who we were before
the races.
KDL
After seeing Ex Machina:
The Singularity
When it happens
what will we become?
Soldier or servant,
slave or judge,
lesser philosopher:
unnecessary yet quaint
reminder
of an evolutionary
hiccup that allowed
the next sentience
to take its place
on the ephemeral
throne where we reigned
for what seemed
a long time.
KDL
Inspired by a dream after watching the film Force Majeure:
The Ice Palace
Underneath the crust of snow
the dreamer lies frozen
in attitude and semblance
long and well forgot.
The thinnest hindrance
between stillness and movement
is still enough to fix one
left underneath.
Air above.
Immobility below.
The mind swims
through rooms that never were.
Ice passages
built by demons
who know the
architecture of the mind
and replicate its
labyrinth
with unholy precision.
The only way out is known only
to the dreamer
but forgot and recrystallized
in each searching swathe.
KDL
Inspired by Hilary Mantel's novel and the recent Masterpiece mini-series, Wolf Hall:
Wolf Hall
Once we lived in three dimensions,
only three, yet enough for us then.
By lamp and paper and wool,
we lived both part and pattern
of the world, woven from the heft.
Touched and scraped and thrown
to earth by it, subsumed
yet earth-scented and amused--
by the lift of an eyebrow, a jest,
knowing naught but what we found
before us: what we read in scrolls,
what was told to us by a priest,
by a child, by the moon.
KDL
From the perspective of one of the characters in the book I'm working on now:
Rhapsode
I am a killer in
my false worlds;
I depose and dispose,
ruthless
as required.
Who is that other self
wielding swords and scythes,
who calls forth, unyielding,
smothering and suicide;
such acts
the rational self
would call a betrayal
and a lie.
With story comes
violence, woven in,
the thin thread of nature
running through
the skein.
KDL