/poetry
Quiet thoughts from a noisy mind.
The Corpse
He rots on the street
In front of my apartment,
Golden and crackling.
"Yours?"
Asks Mrs. Ennui
Behind the laminate desk.
No, my parents'.
Seventeen years to kill;
Two months more to dispose of.
My sister's guilty, really
(That's not all true,
I bashed his head in once,
Until he seeped out lifeblood
And it boiled on his brow).
Insert sigh.
This oily
Relic of an afterthought
Is decaying in my parking spot.
Underground
Big serpent
Side to side
With us in its belly
All of us
Who look back at all of us
And then there’s yellow
Yellow on yellow on yellow
Yellow in yellow and yellow of yellow or yellow by yellow with Yellow in between
I’ve never met these folks inside this snake
And yet here we are
Side to side
I can see clear to Piccadilly from the last seat
Her cousin across the sea
The one I know only slightly better
Is rowdier,
He shows his colors
Bare to the sun
But is rarely ever eats his fill.
Now she burrows down
And to the side
The tunnel collapses and shakes
Like an arching cat back wriggling in a bear trap
Then maybe she comes back up again
(I’m referring to the snake)
Does she ever get angry about how noisy her stomach gets
Or does she listen in like a fly on the wall
Like I do
Selective listener
Side to side
Our today home
Taking us home
but we will be back again tomorrow.
Activism Then
A pair of insurrectionists
Lay quietly in their cots,
The hopes of new tomorrows
Prancing through their thoughts.
The first turned upon his side,
To pose a question tall,
“Listen my good comrade,
Are you not scared at all?”
The second shot up like a kite
In an effort to be brave,
“Be strong my friend, we’re in the right!
By justice are we saved!”
Fate downed quickly o’er the two,
As reckoning so often will,
T’was the day for righteous rebels
The tyrants blood to spill.
The first had started yelling,
But now sheepishly he hid,
For having spotted corpses, he thought,
“Am I to end as him?”
The second had taken to reciting
Their manifesto verse by verse,
Though “justice and equality”
Were sounding slightly worse.
By now the blood began to curdle
And the muskets cracked like whips;
Another round of mother’s sons
Let last cries past their lips.
Thankfully our heroes two,
Had found a shelled out inn.
The first was heaving quiet sobs,
The second napping through the din.
“Oh I’m a fool for coming!”
Wailed the once impudent first.
“Shuddup a second!” griped his friend,
Whose rest was being accursed.
And crash! Their barricade came down,
And the silhouette there stood
And the pompous soldier raised his sword
And charged blind at what he could.
And hero the first shrieked in prayer
And the second’s blood mid-thoughts
And the rabble-rousers collapsed like dung
And their guns and fury forgot.
But lo! As repentance escaped their lips,
Heaven smiled in cheek,
The soldier blindly slashed a beam,
Transforming inn to heap.
At last the noise of fighting
Cascaded to a halt.
Dead livid serfs and bourgeoisie
Both equally at fault.
The heroic pair of partisans
Rolled out from ‘neath their fort.
The smell of ball and powder
Had them feeling out of sorts.
The first began to dust his coat,
And assured he was unscathed.
Each gave the other a foolish grin.
Now that justice’s path was paved.
“Why my friend I’d nearly quit;
Hope nearly had run adry!”
“Not so my ever faithful chap,
T’was your pluck that kept us ‘live!”
And so the pair saluted,
As contented patriots might,
When a cause so preached and duly earned.
Can be forgotten by that night.
Into the eve they took their paths,
To wives, and drink, and home.
Their duties done, a vict’ry won!
And someone’s blood atoned!
Little Brother
He’s an unheld firehose,
Benj.
He pushes our buttons
Like a game.
His eyes shrink
To devious wrinkled slits.
His voice is the tenor trumpet
Of a fourteen year-old;
It paints the walls
With sandpaper
As it bounces
To each of our ears.
To him,
The salt of our frustration
Is sugar in his oatmeal.
Benj wants me to play.
His hands pinch my shoulders
Like a clamp and
Shake them like a sapling.
He still smells as a child
Who plays in the yard all day.
Have you been to Bahia, Boosh Dawg?
No? Come, let’s go!
He’s hypnotized by his imagination
For a moment
Quiet as a hiding hamster
And the train of thought pulls out
Of the station again.
He’s tugging at my sleeve.
What a dingus, he says.
(If I listen, he won’t ever
Leave me be again)
I fink I’ll go bug Larlee again,
She’s a bumpkin.
Bored with me,
He exits stage right.
The quavering valve of anxious thoughts
Turns his soprano lilt flat.
Reclined on the bed I strain
Not to laugh, working horizontally;
Now he ricochets
Like a ping pong ball in a space station.
Boosh Dawg just wants
To look at his phone.
He will play this game
For hours.
He is a genius without a plan,
But this is planned
And not so genius.
Bounce, kick,
Bounce, kick,
Bounce, whoosh.
Bounce, bounce, bounce.
Triste hermanito,
The ball evades his foot,
Dancing down the stairs.
The hose has burst.
To Bury a Son
I wonder
If I have
Wondered enough
What it is like
To bury a son.
To feel the well
Burst
To feel the waves
Crest
And crash
And hurt
Aching at the roofs of mouths
And stinging backs
Of eyelids.
I can blink back dewdrops
All night
And never know.
I will not ask my father
What it is
To lose a daughter
Just like he
Never asked his
Nor his father his
For fear
It would happen
Again.
I can imagine it aches
Like a throbbing homesickness
And the skull-pounding
Of a cold waterfall
But done alone.
God knows,
I suppose,
But I don’t want Him
To show me
How to watch
A son’s burial.
What about the others?
A friend
A brother
A lover
Does it still chap the heart
To know that
Tomorrow is not
An empty hole,
But a filled one?
Filled
With what was a son.
I hope I wonder long enough
So God will let me
Count my fictitious,
Vicarious burden
As enough
So I can
Cry with her
And them
Who opened hearts
To a boy gone soon
In front of the horizon
Made up of everyone.
Walk Two Worlds
I wish I could show you
The tiny little line
I hop across
The top of the chain link fence
When I kick my ball over it.
The wall in the backyard
By the dog shed
Of our old house.
Why did we keep it?
The empty door way always scared me.
I can’t teach you
What shoes to wear with those pants
Or how to fix that haircut
(I can’t fix mine),
But I’ll think to myself you’re doing it wrong;
That’s not what what the cool kids do.
You’re gonna get teased
I’m teasing you now
In my head
And hoping you’ll not notice
That my smile’s too big for my face.
It pains me to think
That we either lock ourselves in a box
Or can’t have walls at all
I think God likes boxes just fine
He wants us to make a home in them.
But boxes don’t sound cool.
I’m tired of showing you
That life in the cozy cardboard
Doesn’t mean you can’t have windows
I’m tired of thinking
About life outside and never getting to leave.
I’ll never explain right
What it’s like
To walk two worlds.
To make them smile from afar
To look but not touch
To climb the fence
Find the ball in the neighbor’s yard
And bring it back
Before Mom sees me.