drkobra

Poems, uncollected ( May 2007 )




Untitled

White ribbed shirt two layers underneath,
hair: pigtailed curtains draping her face.
Tough armor; her bare shoulder broken
by a beige strap. Caps the color of freckled fists.

While she changes; see through my head
the simple equation of a parachute. My beard
measures her neck.




Nobody's Home

Her damp red hair; she shakes the rain while crashing in cars
in a noir cinematography of smoke sucking drags exhaled:
the reversed highspeed camera flick of an iguana's tongue.
Rodin's carved hand plugs her throat with a shot of lead,
the chaser: a soot tinged helix streaming from her nostrils.
Make myself the mist, a nighttime thesis of moire patterns,
or an earthtone shipper with pastel dynamite shoes,
to converse with this Victorian thing. That was yesterday
and yesterday, you'll read, ash fell on Pompeii, but today
the sun bleeds like a flashlight in the mouth.




The Crown of Attacticks

I can't fight the mist when it refuses to be a dragon.

I will be more than the door I walk through, from the Inferno
of my lips to the Adversary of my heart, armed
with this baseball cap of the woven mass
of Odin's ravens, Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory bound,
their feathers rigid, wing over wing, bodies curled;
pliable as death allows, upside down as beaks and heads pry
into the porches of mine ears, they whisper earbud intimate
a fugue of the passenger on another's song.




January Morning. Harrison Apartments. Brushing my Teeth.

After the weekend's digressions of my hippie friends,
after renewed library books with their annotations at the end,
I have to go to work, clean up before birds on wizard trees
warble through my window's jaws their sonatines
as I brush, scrub, spit and rinse; dribble blood and preen
until the smile's the quintessence of health
and replace the toothbrush on the shelf, where it resides:
next to my father's shaving kit, his false teeth inside.




Saturday on the Rocks

My words on paper totter like a toddler,
high school fiancees stroll in love along a stone fence.
He keeps looking back at us; she is pretty and
Bela vocalizes in baby vowels, his magic spells,
waving a huge stick he believes a wizard's wand.
Mike leans on a rock, pulls out a Camel
looking like Ginsberg's famous photo of Kerouac:
eyes folded, nervous square pocket of poems,
his amulet against fear. Portland is finally
a real world, away from this campus
where strangers live together and discriminate.
He will be a confessor of antiquity,
converse in a solitary tongue, to trade one monastery
for another. Sometimes we would sit at night;
whether it was the factory or now on these stones
hold the same conversations. The world hasn't changed:
we're still in Indiana, we're still young.
My dad hasn't died and we still wonder
if the next place will be tomorrow
and will tomorrow be sunny?




Lowered Expectations

The last half of the book when we finally get to the moon,
but its awful dreams are written into twenty foot skeletons.
Hang your coats on their weapons while she opens the curtains:
the flickering molasses of our faces fill a dark room.

Jupiter hasn't exploded, it has always been night.
It doesn't matter.

I have the doll of you, you have the facsimile of me:
we were on the swings, you were eight, I was younger
and haven't seen you since. Maybe you left the island?
Your parents braved the dog, made it to a boat?

The moon is a dollar and then a quarter
and the bones give me fuzzy transmissions.