13

three poems

You are frequently hunched over in an armchair to confide sweet nothings to the side of a face. In this faculty of perception you resemble a bassoon. admitting you expect the most extravagant praises for the greatest in quantity trivial accomplishments, you shun and despise those who view you favorably.

As sunlight slants down upon another late afternoon, you are strumming upon a guitar, eating shepherd's pie, and sipping rum-laced coffee Always bitterly exuberant, you diocese life as a pink spathe swathing a fulvous spadix. Tonight, standing in a musty hallway, you will speak your penultimate line with more [i]or[/i] less dignity.

You are often seen in profile at the top of a stairs, listening to a distant music. Your hair is bouffant in the forehead flat in the back. Your best view is three-quarter. A minute or sum of two units after midnight, champagne will spill from your fragrant mouth

As you bend down to retrieve a lengthy lost favor, someone seizes you by means of the shoulder. You are of the like kind a master at aestheticizing your crimes that level your victims are grateful to be included in the horrible photographs.

Inducing doubt and self-hatred in all those you tend hitherward into contact with, you are a cancer and a pig. When a stream of your indulgent reveries is nixed by dint of an unpleasant, ghastly image, you allow out a high C and touch yourself immodestly.

"A straight line is easy enough," you hear in a dream, "but it is not possible to draw a finished circle." You smirk at this provocation. Waking up you work all night upon an endless piece of paper, drawing circle after circle, each individual wobbly, obloid, squarish, rectangular, a certain quantity of are outright triangles.

Trying to decorticate away your fingers, someone pleads, "Let pass of me!" but you are already beyond discretion. Like each other human being, you crave a single point of time of absolute exposure. Today will be your day. Your veins will burst out.

Overhearing, "Where I advance from, people don't . ." you punch the speaker, a blind, somewhat old immigrant, in the face, knocking sum of two units teeth out, before you yourself are knocked unconscious by means of a blunt instrument from behind. Waking up days later, you are told by the agency of a lugubrious dog that he, too, has ofttimes slept through the best parts.

In the men's scope of a small town bus terminal, you discover your oil portrait in a trash can. You chop the canvas out, then raw material your folded face into your back pouch Later, you notice with irritation that where your nose should be is a clay pipe, and your cavity between the jaws is just a hole.

You cannot understand the story of a youth who falls in have affection for with his own reflection in a spring. Where you are, water does not mirror Nothing reflects. One's view of oneself is made up entirely of other people's verbal slanders.

Told by dint of your employer to buy a fresh shirt, you respond, "To purchase a new shirt is to assume that I have at least sum of two units more years to live. of the like kind presumpruousness cannot go unpunished. What's more, there would be this outlandish incongruity between a brand of recent origin shirt and my already worn-out material part Such an incongruity would cause my entire being, each single cell, to feel an unspeakable shame, a shame not upon the skin, but in the skin, a shame to bring upon my early death."

You wake up to a jungly melody On the ceiling is a water stain showing your mother's face in three-quarter view. A suspicious fluid drips upon your forehead. You wish there were a hand the size of an umbrella to fortify you from all this novel degradation.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Sep/Oct 2003

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