Mark DuCharme

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                                            for Joel Chace

Friction burns— a slow mirage

Under the benchmark laughingstocks

Without clouds or other parameters

Alter the face of townhome living

Eke out the breath of hometown loving

Faces added to a day

Permanent mentions

Evaporating minutes

Into which cave did the

Window see

Like a crane-mirror or

Dayglo operator

An orange composed of

Thousands of dots

Indices that you

No longer enact—

If the mirror’s behind you

Look up

The weather is usually elsewhere

Neither as ever as

All song allows

Wary Ditty

Provisionally inspired by thunderstorms

Ours was a great coup

The loofah broke the subaltern smirk

In a vocabulary of tainted housing

I see myself in you when you see

Arcade misery bonbons, three for a dollar

At the bullseye a short glass recital

Tired forms drifting

The lint inspector went haywire

Harsh with tinkling derivatives

Offkey as a moot idler

Above whom no icy moon may lean

Can you amortize breath?

What hunger jitters

By the forest of night trees, where dead

Children cough?

Satyrday’s Martyr

Some people fake it—

Others do get by—

What do you need, that doesn’t

Need repair

At a fruitstand in January, after

Yesterday’s malice—

You know what you don’t mean

To say, like a raw customer

Whose only mortal cries do now

Elicit disrepair—

Are you okay, on Thursday

After Sunday’s gone

Like a sprinkling of flags on a desecration

Whose only (wicked) dreams do (often) fly

Clang or sway— then go awry

Or fall— fall away laughing—

 Cry

Genre permeability task force enlightenment

Underhanded triggers

Overbearing disciples

Faint, startled reasoning

It’s not about anything, actually

Live where you want to

Consider the moon

It’s funny

Don’t go haywire

Don’t trust those who waver

Instead, blurt ecstatic

Unlike those who often are

Cast thou now ashore

Remember everybody else’s dull game

Insurance tricks, likely

To worry or inflect

Someday, I’ll meet you

In a lonely garage

As if you weren’t still someone else

Who didn’t have to hear others cry

Plan

                   “to gain the night to write” —Clark Coolidge

 The bilge packers were loading

Dark oboes in a camera-obscura

Vase-like contraption, while woofers went wild

Castigating subaltern repairman-lecturers

It was another fall of vice-presidents’ emails

Sifted through unique, weathered geometry

Where we felt compelled to linger or invent

At whatever slow intensity that rain brings to silence

& Starving robins, who eke out abundance through misery

In the field habits of everyday, lumpen advisors

Aligned with what all true-blond mirrors mean

At an idle reversal or summary. They cling

Now in night-grammar

Upon dark shores, where dullards sing

Tonight, in bad faith

Cross-referencing an influencer torch recovery action plan

Evacuate all extreme night rentals

Next stop: the window that cries

As far as mercantile followers go, you’re on your own

In the low factory of days

A Raw Tongue (Where Angels Burn)

The tumbler recalibrated windchimes at noon

Aluminum solubles in a bucket of shelving

Don’t vanish the evicted with handbills

Until peonies are shadows to your dithering

Hands off lathes at musty corners

Wintering for a shimmer a dull noon clanker

A nightmare scenario for people pleasers

Call in the faith healers a cantilevered embarkation

A cornice for resonant angels in real time

Petunias & fritillary devotional figments

A raw tongue gone wrong

Ludic with imperative pleasures

Undermining beer gardens or citing hostilities

While others snore if you think you mean it

Dot the seasons with a rumpled pose

& New perspectives on flowering

Don’t blurt out the old decimation

Instead become rancid with calm

Mortifying speechifiers by entitled primping

In the guise of flinty igneous fossils

That birds detain normally blossoming zebras

Where avid stumblers unleash harm

Become animated in wintry allure

As if there were also a haywire doubling

Bland speech bruited brushed aside

Like crushed vagrant ghouls
 

Mark DuCharme’s poem “Thirst” won the Synchronized Chaos poetry contest in 2026.  His recent books include Complicated Grief and Thousands Blink Outside, both from C22 Open Editions; Here, Which Is Also a Place from Unlikely Books; Scorpion Letters from Ethel; and his work of poet’s theater, We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film, from The Operating System.  Since You Asked will be published by C22 in January 2027.  His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as bethh, BlazeVOX, Caliban Online, Chant de la Sirène, Colorado Review, Eratio, eYeland, First Intensity, Gas, Indefinite Space, Moss Trill, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Talisman, Trilobite, Typo, Unlikely Stories, Utriculi, Vanitas, Word/ for Word, The Writing Disorder, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary.  He lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.