Some poems for you all:
Three Easy Pieces
1.
Art Show at Leitchfield Crossing
School children,
standing at Leitchfield Crossing
waiting for their bus
and watching the passing art show
rolling past them
on iron frames.
What must they wonder on
with the wild-assed typography,
the sprayed on flourescence,
‘splayed with quick and practiced psssssts
out of their smoking joyous dreams
and night terrors
in the train yards
of their juvenile hobo hearts.
2.
Pirates,
Consult your world.
Prime that pump with attention
even if your eyes water and your body hurts
and your ears ring
with the decaying knell of reality,
Like that fading echo,
my self fades into the heart of the morning,
books in front of me like dominos.
pushed upright instead of flipped over.
So what is it we really want here—
the fall of one over and over or the ivory clicks
Red dog brought over some deer bones
washed up from the wood’s.shores
They spell out “I… S”.
What is?
Hell, what isn’t?
What kind of oracular tool might these leg bones augur?
Every day I toss them back into the woods
and every day the red dog brings them back to spell out I….S.
What story, what story worthy moment arises
from this everyday lazarus of bones?
Is it, “I am dead?”
Or “I am bonez.”?
So many bones in our ground.
Perhaps we are supposed to bury dem b0nez.
dem leg bonez?
We are the graveyard sextons
charged with digging graves
and mowing grass
and keeping count and mapping the dead.
The actuaries of the dead,
we account for all who are pressed upon us
by whatever circumstance.
All of these creatures,
pet friends and wild critters,
are bidden into our ground
to be delivered into the wild hunt,
that joyous faery hunt of the happy prey.
but in this hunt no one dies,
there is only play-belief and game.
What lapping waves
wash which treasures to be combed from the shore,
alive or dead in some oracular 8-ball,
some cranial pentementi seen only
by pirates leaping over the gunwales,
like night terrors with cutlass and tooth
Ready to take down the ship.
3.
