Ripping Yarn

Whoever he was, he’s dead now — 
Beyond our justice anyhow 
You slice it. All the same, we’d like to know 
His name, if only so 
We can can eviscerate him in
The dark alleys of public opinion. 

The letter everybody says 
He didn’t write was in red ink because 
The blood he had collected in an empty 
Bottle of ginger beer congealed too quickly. 
They think it was a newspaper man, 
Propping up the flagging circulation. 

Round Trip

The supernumerary star 
Departing from Orion 
Flies like a parting arrow-shot 
Backwards at the Lion
Rearing on its two hind feet 
Upward in the east, 
While for the dim horizon’s hills 
The Hunter quickly flees. 

Doorbell

The tree in the front yard 
Keeps peering in the windows
And waving its hands,
As if it is someone 
I know, who knows that I am home 
Despite my not answering
The tinkling wind chimes. 

The Ruined Garden

Decolorized, a garden grows 
Less friendly than before. 
Without its lovely red, the rose
Is just a weed with thorns. 

Deprived of green, the grasses cease 
To lap like gentle waves, 

But flutter feebly in the breeze, 
The moldy thatch of graves. 

The fountain that this morning flashed 
And sparkled in the heat, 

Now falls in filthy tatters like 
A fraying winding sheet. 

Even the great white cotton clouds,
So harmless in the light, 
Like ghostly galleons terrorize
The star bombarded night. 

Less kind, but no less beautiful;
Less colorful, but still 
As magical or more without 
The superficial frills. 

Moon Tree

A plaque here says the seed 
That gave birth to this tree 
Once orbited the moon.
 
I readily concede 
The tree looked plain to me 
Until I knew that too. 

Shadow Box

Sometimes I imagine 
All of the letters crowding 
The ruled shelves of a paper
Cabinet slowly bowing 

Beneath them as I weigh them 
And place them carefully 
From left to right in something 
Akin to symmetry, 

And pray that when I’m finished 
And close the thin glass door, 
I haven’t said so much 
It crashes to the floor. 

Sparkler

Planted in the dark: 
Electric dandelion 
Shedding blazing seeds. 

Attic

Here the ribs of the house lie unconcealed, 
The skin of paint and plaster peeled away; 
The soft pink flesh of fiberglass revealed: 
The belly of the whale in which your days 
Were swallowed whole, with all this other junk
Like Jonah or Geppetto, while the world 
Was going on outside. In here you sunk
Your passions in your Pequod, and grew old. 
Neck-deep in the bric-a-brac of years, 
Which clings to you like barnacles — a crust 
Of sessile things that moved whenever you did,
And when you didn’t multiplied like dust — 
You stand behind a giant, filmy eye
And stare out at a world that passed you by. 

Time Slip

The pale green plastic saucer 
Wobbles a little bit 
As it flies from me to my daughter,
The way the Martian ships 

In those old science-fiction 
Double-features did, 
When we did not exist 
And my dad was just a kid. 

Now my dad is dust,
And the girl who wrapped her fist 
Around my fingertip
Plucks the puny disc

Out of the air, as if 
It was just a frisbee,
Or she was now a fifty-
Foot tall giantess. 

Charm for a Pencil

From dark, inchoate chaos, 
Summon now, ye wand, 
Words worthy of a poet 
As I wave you with my hand;

Or else if what is wanted 
Is magical persuasion, 
Then subtlety or bombast 
Befitting the occasion; 

If art, then render pictures 
Enchanting to the eye;
If fairy tales, then fictions
As real as you and I. 

Radio

A little dog someone has left 
Tied to a garden fence
Lies down in the sunburnt grass 
And immediately commences 

Making minute adjustments to 
The dishes of its ears, 
Tuning into frequencies 
That I will never hear. 

Event Horizon

At the reservoir’s glass bottom,
A sticky residue 
Is all that remains of a bottle 
Of something green in hue,

Which made me so besotted 
It left a great abyss 
Like a terrible black dot
Where time does not exist. 

Selectric

For knocking off a final draft, 
Nothing beats the rat-a-tat
Blast of a semi-automatic. 

Sprung

The hundred clocks of April 
Strike the hour at once, 
Scattering the flighty 
Treetops like a gun;

Shattering the silence,
Clanging on and on;
Clamoring like children;
Shivering like gongs;

Splashing like a raindrop;
Surging like a throng;
Sending out their singing 
Bird automatons;

Springing up like flowers; 
Showering like stones; 
Ringing like an un-
Attended telephone. 

Upward Mobility

The bricks as they have grown apart
Have drawn a secret stair
Beginning at the building’s floor 
And ending in thin air,

Where someone’s laundered linen waves 
And dances in the breeze
Above a darkened alleyway
Between two one-way streets. 

Thrift

On one side, people feasted 
On mounds of low-priced junk, 
Gorging themselves like beasts 
On stale and moldy hunks; 

On the other side, they waited 
In line, their bloated trunks 
Bursting with chewed up waste,
And took turns blowing chunks. 

Ardath Bey

The glint between the barely parted 
Eyelids first, like distant stars,
Or candles swamped in seas of tar, 
Grows brighter slowly — small, twinned sparks
Fanned by the words a man has started 
Speaking; and though the dusty heart 
No longer beats, the dry lips part
In an awful moan, devoid of art 
Or meaning; he moves; the other darts 
For safety, screaming — it isn’t far 
Enough; more screams; the screen goes dark. 

Lohse

Abandoned in unplanned-for haste, 
As if before a storm, 
The houses, he would later say, 
Had seemed to him “still warm.”

Half-eaten meals congealed on plates;
The children’s toys lay strewn
Haphazardly across the floors
Of freshly silenced rooms. 

He took the silverware and tossed
The Torahs in the fire.
He took the paintings from the walls 
And left some hooks and wire. 

He even took the furniture, 

The better to enjoy 
The skill of the Old Masters as
The owners were destroyed. 

The Gnat

There is some kind of gnat 
Drowning in what 
To it must seem a vat 
Of wine, but which in fact 
Is merely a glass, 
And half full at that. 
Half empty, perhaps, 
If you are the gnat. 

Earthworks

They lie atop
The giant mounds 
Of earth like giant 
Crumbling crowns 
Upon the furrowed,
Weathered brows
Of ancient kings
Who lie here now,
Beneath the hills,
And wear them still. 

Rejection

Thank you for your interest 
In Tomorrow’s Free Domain. 
Unfortunately, everything 
We publish is the same 
Old garbage, and we didn’t 
Recognize your name. 
Please consider paying us 
To submit your work again. 

~ The Editors 

Orbital Resonance

I saw the rings of Saturn once —
Albeit from a distance:
A record etched with grooves to which 
The universe was listening. 

The circle past the dead wax lacked 
A label or a name, 
Though neither was it strictly speaking 
Absolutely plain. 

It must have been an opera 
Or something else thematic
If even from so far away 
It sounded so dramatic. 

Doom Scrolling

These birds lined up upon the fence 
In different attitudes,
Presented as they are against 
Papyrus sunset hues,
Compose a vaguely ominous, 
Anonymous cartouche.

Sunset Crater

Like giant sticks of dynamite 
Blown out at either end,
The trees lie lifeless on their sides
Atop the blackened sand —
Between the great gunpowder hills 
That dot this blasted land. 

Bright Ideas

Whereas without encouragement
(Was ever word more apt?)
The keg (to keep the metaphor
From drink) is hard to tap;
And often, even if somehow 
You manage, in a flash,
You’ll find you’ve tapped the powder keg,
And turned it all to ash. 

The Art of Composition

In hollow hoots the wind evokes 
Soft music from a bottle’s throat — 
And all I have to do is take 
Another drink, to change the note.

Riot

Rebuked by every rock
And waving blade of grass,
The pitchfork-wielding trees
And the white-hot wrath

Of the sun’s fiery torch, 
I cower and fall back 
Behind the castle doors,
And make the latches fast; 

And huddle in a corner, 
And pray the storm will pass; 
And cover up my ears
To mute the breaking glass. 

Matrix

The rain of ones and zeroes 
Beyond the window screen, 
As in a magic mirror, 
Resolved itself at three 

Into a bright but bleary
Bucolic blend of green 
And blue and yellow queries
Of questionable meaning. 

Whispering Gallery

 — St. Paul’s Cathedral, London

The moment they are uttered 
The whispers in this vault 
Flutter up to the ceiling 
Upside-down and fall 

Asleep wrapped in their wings
Like bats, or backwards leaves
Returning to their branches,
And rustle in the breeze. 

Merlin’s Cave

The waves that pried it open this dark maw
Swallows now in a never ending yawn
That stretches from the Haven to West Cove 
Beneath the ruined castle far above. 

The last few rock hewn steps that used to reach 
The threshold at low tide washed out to sea, 
So those who would must clamber carefully 
Down boulders slick with algae to the beach. 

But now the tide is rising, and the sun 
And cave like kindred spirits have begun
To set. Before too long they’ll both be gone, 
And you will say that this is just a song. 

Meditation in an Emergency

Of course it’s sad when someone’s house 
Is burning down, smoke billowing 
From every door and window in
A parody of a girl about 
To blow her lid; of course it is 
No laughing matter; I submit,
However, if among the crowd
Of gawkers in their dressing gowns,
There is a poet, they would be 
Remiss in failing to point out 
The beauty of the cherry red 
And chrome emergency machines
Lining the lane; the flashing lights; 
The iridescent water like 
A rainbow arching from the gleaming 
Nozzles of banana yellow
Hoses; or the ladder leaning 
Up against a passing cloud, 
As if the fellow at the top 
Right now, we’re bartering with God. 

Black Frock Coat

Fluttering out around him 
Bat-like as he leapt 
Dramatically from balcony 
To stage and staggered; swept 

Up off of his knees 
As he raised his dagger high,
Declaiming to the audience, 
“Forever thus to tyrants!”

Streaming like a flag 
Retreating from the fray
As turning on his heels he fled
The bloody scene, afraid;

Clinging to his back
As he galloped through the night; 
Pillowed underneath his head 
In dawn’s unblinking light;

Spattered with his blood 
Beneath a burning barn;
Spread out, useless, like his hands 
That day at Garret’s farm. 

On an Antique Iron Wall Sconce

Out of this basket    a bright bouquet
Of orange fire    like flowers flamed
Each day at dusk    in days of old. 
Now only the rose    of rust remains,
Whose parched petals    peel away 
And fall to the floor    in russet flakes 
The next strong wind    will sweep away. 

Chauvet

Emerging like a sculpture 
From a canvas carved from stone,
A herd of charcoal horses churns 
The dust to blood and bones.

The torchlight this illusion 
Makes even clearer still, 
As from the flames the tossing manes 
Appear to gather will.

They thunder past on hooves 
Whose clap has not been heard 
Since darkness rode the mountain down 
In clouds of snorting earth. 

Job Description

Is easily distracted, lazy, prone 
To flights of fancy; can’t be counted on; 
Is often sullen, selfish and withdrawn;
Has few friends and prefers to play alone;
Skips classes often; never turns in homework;
Is overly and quite overtly fond 
Of members of the other sex; responds 
To criticism poorly; takes a tone 
Of disrespect with elders, which includes 
All teachers; has no use for institutions 
Of higher learning; steadfastly refuses 
To take direction; does not follow rules; 
Lies outright or exaggerates the truth;
Obsesses over meaningless minutiae. 

Orphans

Written after viewing the “Acoustic America” exhibit at the Musical Instruments Museum.

Supine in their cases;
Propped upright on stands; 
Suspended in the air like wraiths; 
Or in the outstretched hands 

Of fragile racks, the fiddles, 
Banjos, mandolins, 
Guitars with nicknames, basses, little 
Ukuleles limned 

In legend long for players 
To cradle them and sing,
And teach them how to say their prayers, 
And brush their knotted strings. 

Tumbleweed

Perambulating cloud
Of dust and tangles going down 
The sidewalk like a brawling crowd 
In comic strips, or Charlie Brown’s 
Buddy Pig-Pen now.

MS. Found Throttled

Dear Sir, there is a gentleman you know 
Beside me here, at Ryan’s Fourth Ward polls, 
Who goes by the cognomen Edgar Poe.

Admitted 5 pm on 3 October. 
As soon as I was able, I went over. 
Excitable . . . delirious . . . not sober. 

Saturday night commences calling, “O
Reynolds! Reynolds! Reynolds!” until say oh
Three o’clock Sunday morning, when he goes 

Into a stupor endlessly misquoted. 
Perhaps this current leads to the South Pole. 
Of course, there is no certain way . . . oh no. 

October’s War

Season of butterflies 
Colliding in mid-air
And spiraling to earth 
To smolder brightly there; 

Of noxious clouds of gnats
One can’t help but inhale, 
And army ants erupting 
Like lava from their hills;

Of humming, barbed-wire hedges
Electrified by bees, 
And grasshopper grenades 
Exploding at your feet; 

And after dark the sirens
Trembling through the night 
Of crickets crouched in crumbling 
Shelters out of sight. 

Chandelier

An errant piece of chandelier 
I almost missed it was so clear
Lay in the road this morning,
Like a giant crystal tear 
A cloud had brushed away the night before.

 
I picked it up and held it to the light 
To see if I could strike 
A rainbow, but all I 
Saw was a shard of sky
Multiplied a dozen times
Hanging in the sun on the other side.

Famine Wall

How long it must have taken to build 
This wall, that snakes among the hills
Waist-high to us where it’s intact, 
Though very often shorter than that
Where rocks have fallen off and lie, 
Some near, and some as far away
As those who stacked them — not, they say, 
Half joking, to divide not much 
From not much more, but just because 
There were so many of them, and 
They had to put them somewhere to use the land.

On a Statue of Hades

The space the god behind the glass 
Beholds holds me, but see me he 
Does not. Imagining the throng 
Of souls the wind like sparks has passed
Before him to the dark beyond, 
That he has ceased to notice seems
Appropriately divine. His right 
Hand holds his hellhound’s chain leash tightly, 
While in his left his double pronged 
Staff of office is resting lightly. 
In life, he would have worn a coat 
Of gaily-colored paint, or so 
I’m told; but glowing here, a ghost 
In cold white marble, suits him most, 
Now that he’s joined his silent host. 

Conscience

The daylight seeps so slowly from the sky 
That you forget it’s going till it’s gone. 
It’s dark, and you are sitting all alone
In your backyard. You can’t remember why. 

There’s no one home, but no one said goodbye. 
You don’t know where they went or for how long. 
Your neighbor’s singing that Hank Williams song
That says he is so lonesome he could cry. 

You brush aside the feeling something’s wrong. 
It’s cooler now, at least, you think, and sigh.
The night is so much softer on the eyes
Than glaring day with all its floodlights on. 

Broken Clock

Its hands still move from time to time, 
If the wind is up and blowing;
But not without a creaking sound, 
And only very slowly. 

At three and six and nine and twelve,
It swears a solemn oath.  
At half past one, it tells you where 
Instead of when to go. 

At one and four and seven and ten, 
The weather will be fair; 
But if it strikes eleven, two, 
Or five or eight, beware. 

A Pox on Careless Readers

Let their names be tattooed on their foreheads. 
Let their clothes always be covered in coffee stains.
Let their ears be folded down forever. 
Let their eyebrows be highlighted in yellow. 
Let all of their thoughts be marginal. 
Let their jackets be torn and discarded. 
Let them reek of cigarette smoke. 
Let bugs infest their crevices. 
Let dust be heaped upon them. 
Let the hinges of their joints be loosened. 
Let their spines be cracked. 
Let their remains be stuffed into a cardboard box in the garage and forgotten. 
Let a cat piss on that box. 

The Tower

Rising out of a restless sea
Of rustling leaves, the lighthouse heaves
Its bricks a hundred and sixty feet
Into the air, and bravely glares 
Out at the endless, surging leagues 
Of tireless ocean laying siege 
To the tiny strand of rocks and sand 
And trees upon whose back it stands, 
And scans the waves with its rolling eye, 
And points its finger by and by 
At everything and everywhere, 
As if to say that there and there 
And there the shipwrecked sailors lie
Who had it stood would not have died. 

Fare Game

Bippity boppity 
Thomas Sean Connery 
Once told a cabbie he 
Knew his way round. 

“I was a milkman here.”
“Yeah?” Said the cabbie un-
Enthusiastically — 
“Whatcha do now?” 

Abracadabra

If written right and uttered well
By someone with the proper skill, 
A formal poem is like a spell. 

Take the winding villanelle, 
Which conjures spirits good and ill 
If written right and uttered well: 

As when they’re rung correctly, bells 
Can summon, sadden, warn, or thrill,
A formal poem is like a spell 

For working magic fair and fell;
And there is little doubt it will, 
If written right and uttered well. 

Like fortunes only time will tell,
It may take many years until
A formal poem is like a spell.

So if it doesn’t work, don’t kill
The messenger; remind yourself:
If written right and uttered well, 
A formal poem is like a spell. 

Cerberus

Roland, headless, steeped in gore. 

Pin-striped waiter’s soup du jour. 
Machine that made the twenties roar. 

Organ grinder, piano, drum;
Trench broom, street sweeper — better run;
Chicago typewriter, Tommy gun. 

Muzzle foaming, breathing fire. 
Tail a-wagging death for hire. 
Nostrils smoking, funeral pyre. 

A Thousand Cuts

A locomotive whistle welling up 
Like screams from a charwoman’s bottomless throat. 
A bathtub as a thirsty porcelain cup 
Whose curtain rings unbutton like a coat. 
A name no one remembers in a glass 
Of disappearing dust and garbage wrappers. 
A crippled peeping Tom with time to pass.
A dog who goes down for the long dirt nap. 
Plane as Grim Reaper; leading man as grain.
Fifth column dentists; marksmen made of clay 
Pretending to be pigeons. One man’s vain 
Crusade to stop blondes falling in the bay.
Macabre, suspenseful, droll, unhinged, absurd. 
A man assaulting actresses with birds. 

The Vase

A priceless object handled with 
The utmost care will break, 
Or weather past credulity
Catastrophe, if fake. 

Canyon

My hand goes out to grip the rail
Reflexively, to cope 
In some small way with an unexpected 
Spell of vertigo. 

“Oh yes,” my mind is telling me, 
“I’m sorry, I forgot 
To say the world is old and vast,  
And you are young and not.” 

The last time I was here, I was 
My son, my now-dead father 
Was me, my wife my mother, and 
My sister was my daughter. 

The sky keeps changing channels. We 
Don’t have clouds in the valley. 
The ground shifts underneath me like 
The foredeck of a galley. 

The ocean has been emptied; naked 
Islands climb like cliffs 
Into the sun, then crumble slowly 
Into the abyss. 

A single muddy puddle barely 
Visible below
Remains in which to drown, if I 
Am so inclined to do so. 

The Garret

(An Ekphrasis on The Death of Chatterton)

He’s draped across the bed as if asleep. 
He looks as if he’s had too much to drink. 
As if to prove that he was right to think
It wouldn’t matter, dawn’s begun to creep 
In at the open window. There’s a heap
Of torn up paper; an empty jar of ink;
A burned out candle; and petals from a pink
Flower. Beneath the limp, romantic sweep
Of his right arm, there is an empty vial
Lying on the floorboards; and in the corner
The bright red coat he’d worn the day before. 
The ghost of something strangely like a smile
Plays on his lips, as if he were a child
Who knows no one can hurt him anymore. 

The Architect

Doors in the ceilings, windows in the floors,
Stairs going nowhere, decoy bathrooms for
Confusing vengeful spirits not confused
Already by the racket, seventeen
Chimneys for forty-seven fireplaces,
Bats in the belfry, crowds of dead men howling
Out in the endless, God-blessed, skull-bedecked,
Blood-soaked dark American wilderness,
Out past ten thousand panes of pretty stained
Glass she tried in vain to hide behind,
A room festooned with gleaming rifles, one 
Automatic electric elevator, 
Gold chandeliers, and hand-made spider webs.

Lacunae

All but lost for a thousand years,

It wasn’t Yorick’s skull
Or noble Alexander’s dust
They found but poor Catullus
Stopping a bunghole, stained with wine
(Or so the story goes),
Whole passages erased by time,
In a cellar in Verona. 

So soused he was, one witness said 
That every other word
Was garbled, and you wouldn’t want
To hear the ones that weren’t.
But this was for posterity, 
He reasoned, so he wrote 
Whatever he could gather down, 
And added, in a note: 

You, reader, whoever you are 
Whose hands this book may find, 
Pardon the [blank] corruption [blank] 
It is no fault of mine. 
Transcribed from an exemplar [blank]
Was [blank] corrupt as well, 
I did the best I could. If you 
Don’t like it, [blank] yourself. 

Lo, My Boot

A symphony of chainsaws, 
Cacophony of dogs,
The roar of passing fighter jets, 
Cuts through the peaceful fog 

Of morning like that thing 
They used to use to cure 
Insanity but think not right 
That do they anymore.

Portrait Gallery

Staring down from their elevated place

Upon the wall, with something like disdain
For objects as ephemeral as plain 
Human beings, the finely rendered faces 
Frozen like flies in amber in thick frames 
Of gold leaf, in their collars of white lace,
Try less and less to look like those whose names 
They have assumed, of whom so little trace
Remains that soon the people and the paintings
Will be so different they will be the same. 

Doppelgänger

He thinks that he is someone else — 

Someone famous, someone wealthy, 
Someone handsome, someone healthy — 
Someone less like...well, himself. He 
Put this other person on 
The way that you or I might don 
Our clothes. He’s worn him for so long 
He thinks that who he was is gone. 
I see him on the bench across 
The platform sometimes, looking lost 
In reverie — a lonely ghost 
Alone with what he wanted most.