2 New Poems

Three-Line Bio

Let’s put it to rest:
the coal miner’s lung infection
of repeating sickle strikes
deep basin echoes dragging
things out far past the point
of all sense,
of all proportion,
of all sensible tut-tut ATM machine
rhetoric into something more
metered by presence of children’s
garden places, by half-swallowed acceptance
of our matted skin after
all.

We’re not some social service
office folder, hastily shuttered
with tax lien bills and scrawled
physician’s chicken scratch;
we bloom with atmosphere’s
radiance, empty-handed on
sidewalk dimensions, beer glass
table rings as Olympian in
dedication.

A goodbye bow in hair,
airy-fairy floating frost
that turns to memoirist’s
summer with treated drug
of missed impossibility.

After Blasting Caps

It comes across as Irish rain,
the singing saw warble of voice,
knocked-loose vulture sky
circling to say:

“Take me this way,
nothing more.”

It takes you close to chest,
closer to the rummage of radio days,
looking for dances we did
as cocksure 20-something
strikers:

“You aren’t contemporary,
are you?”

In wake of explosions, what
more is here to remark,
what more to clamor for
amongst piecemeal rubble,
played in cinematic string
sectional humming:

“It had to be this way,
didn’t it?”

1 New Poem

Boarding Luggage

I number the points of electric
candle glow on wooden back walls,
the endangered rising of old-style
English police sirens and the
gargle-rabble sort of shouting,
indistinct low-end hum you
take wool shears to,

and be the lamb’s crossing.

In chance defeated, word by perilous
word as boxer’s blow, red-gloved
but never quite the knockout, just
dancing with time unspooled to
eternity.

I count spackle-gray
paint chip clouds on letterless
Sunday alongside pounding
headboard strikes of walked-o
dirty soles, of coming upon
less-traveled roadway map
and tangling them to nowhere’s
lead.

To say you’d love me like
Americans on vacation
wouldn’t be the half-knot
of Boy Scout code spark,
cracking it for sunways,

but all deserved.

1 New Poem

On Fainting in Tube Stations

I don’t want that smart bomb sort
of love, that painless thing all
beset with clang of rust knife,
mouse click, screen swipe, before you
meet to touch.

I wish us not to belong to modernity’s
gold-laced bars, that hedonist’s
psychology of the thing,
but rather in some futurist’s fashion,
reinventing risk in step.

To pass time with pine needling
observance, vain seduction
of pictures waiting in turn,
runs its course as long as rivers
flow, grass grows green.

Revealing stares of Platonic
shape, shoving awkwardly in
slumber party chatter, imagination
of wedding cake decorations
at fifteen and vine hanging solemn.

Can’t let the clock hands drop
mania of wording tongue;
buying books of Badiou
and Sartre to make sense
of name.

Like opening of lips to
accept chest breath, resigned
laying, light pollution obstruction
for North Stars on south-facing
youth spit-shine ball diamond.

There aren’t five couplets for that
stringing lamppost memory I’ll
write in old age about it, these
summery flings between accolade pages.

Or, then again, with bonfire we make
of address books, of phone records
like some desperate Polish secret police
archivist on the walls’ last day:

I’ll forget
but,
no, couldn’t,
that clumsy kind of love.

1 New Poem

Limey Lemon

You said, “silence is that ancient
virtue, a former ruling class’s
inheritance we spent on cheap
booze boxes instead; so, why
not drain those gold glint paces
here in arm’s length tonight?”

There isn’t so much a reason to
say no, the foil of
champagne bottle tops still
sparks late evening light in
bringing cold the past’s morgue rooms.

Yet, I hold back from lips,
from red-hued possibility.

Yet unready, unsteady in
emotionless clanging of street steel,
wet concrete.

There was more to these black
phases, fuzzy-tuned radio dial
bleat, than I could tell
in swelling tongue.

Yet thousands of pin-prick
destructions behind starched
shirt collars.

Yet thousands of unsolved
lives behind cream dress
hues.

1 New Poem

Incompletion

Professorial papers, unshredded legacies,
postcolonial pastimes give
off airs to waning conversation
like pre-Confessional movements:
still suit-and-tie, but wider-open,
but controlled in pen line,
to what we are.

Blurry but for the half-manic
blush of celestial turning,
the handicraft of Swe-Danish programmers
with imperceptible accents
as grid piping,
as semaphore happenstance.

Hang your hat to fencepost,
gated garden twine at
noon-hand striking, at
Queen Lace when night runs
aground on dawn light; have somewhere
to lay heads. If not
next as matchmaker pinheads

Then dreaming, dreaming

of circles unbroken.