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?”