Five Poems by T.K. Edmond

 

Some Systems

 

Couldn’t you taste the alien fog

that hung so thick where you 

grew them like weeds in a vase?

 

I wonder if you even felt it fall

when it swallowed you whole

and poisoned the desert soil.

 

With white-knuckled hands 

you pruned them down to a size 

more appropriate for trampling.

 

Some buddings are best forgotten.

Some of us are just born rotten.

 

 

When All of God’s Singers Get Home

(For Great-Grandmother Hayes after the forenamed hymn by Luther G. Presley)

 

A grain of sand underneath my fingernail

 

throb

 bobbing

 

to the surface of awareness as the clothed body 

of my great-grandmother whistling a warm,

familiar hymn and dead-man floating in the pool

of a neighbour, child, or friend. She loved to swim.

No toddler, no tome, no amount of polyester 

would be enough to sink her. Could any anchor 

choke her tune or would it be carried on upward 

a note at a time by the bubbles of her longeval breath?

 

It stops.

                                          Sleeping, 

slipping,

 

wafted ‘neath heaven’s fair dome? A child dives, 

a wave, Grandmother’s head bumps the tile—

sets the old tune loose to again engrave 

the melody and set the beat by which the Richter 

of collective memory will be read by generations 

of swimmers bobbing in her wake. Layers 

upon layers of that song of delight—

of the minerals required to turn a grain of sand 

 

into a pearl

almost early

enough to overcome sin. Hallelujah, amen.

 

 

Rûaħ

 

Summer hail in the afternoon— 

mythic moons at night—

 

flies on fire

with the violent colours of nature.

 

Mother Earth is a neon-laden 

nymphaea with hot, thick roots.

 

O, to be a water sign—a soaking 

cushion for her pin—

 

a living, breathing, actuating vessel

for nothing but perpetuating

 

the existence of a very old, 

breath-taking hat.

 

 

Steeplechase

 

Easy bake pilgrims yield to the wheel

of hand-me-down, mid-size sedans.

They hit like communion—they pray 

like chimneys as the sun pulls up 

sheets and fingers turn keys.

 

With smoke signs drifting silly secrets 

out of cracked windows to you, me 

and no one, the gilded youth trek 

a neon path past steeples of every flavour 

and meth-museums willing: Live Better.

 

Is this the promised land: this century 

old urine stain on the dank floor 

of the world’s locker room? 

Is this the year of jubilee: this bong rot age, 

marked by a deafening shortage of white noise?

 

O, lit pilgrims leave these laments 

for the noisy bastards who should have died young. 

Remember that they too used to chill 

and enjoy the drive

once up a very distant time.

 

But they were surprised when they touched the face of God to find that he needed a shave. 

They wept like animals when they kissed his mouth and his taste was sour smoke and Stone I.P.A..

 

 

Water Trash

 

On approach, 

            southbound, you move toward a skyline, 

more alien and soulless the closer you get. 

You blink. 

 

A refinery.

 

It calls 

            to mind the underside of a junker, writ metropolis, 

whose complexity sprawls through an overgrown, windswept 

Corpus Christi, Texas— 

 

where all signs point to open water. 

 

Big-ass beers 

from Stripes; a handoff with the Bluff Rats. Once you hit 

ocean, Big Oil is back. Over bridges and through the islands to Padre: 

scatter plot rigs,

 

monstrous in precision, ugliness and intention.

 

You imagine 

            their function. You think of alchemy. The ocean is the titan’s titan

                                    —brutal, beautiful, pure—

but the sight of these structures, lit up and torching like obscene 

Christmas trees, 

 

might make you believe more in Man than God. 

 

On Padre Island, 

            go to the beach where you may plough down the National Seashore. 

Drive for an hour to find your clean, isolated spot. You are alone. 

The clouds

 

have become H-bomb plumes of Arcadian popcorn. 

 

The water 

            is a shimmering sheet of coke bottle glass that morphs 

over raking waves like gems shattering. In the distance: more rigs—

little junkyard dogs on the mist—

 

guard your gulf and own these waters.

 

But on a long enough timeline

            there can only be Ocean.

T.K. Edmond is a writer, musician, and graduate student in English at the University of Texas at Arlington. As a fifth generation Texan and a preacher's son/grandson/nephew/cousin, he writes about beauty and cruelty colliding in odd corners of Texas--where the size and conception of 'nowhere' is beyond reckoning. He is interested in dream logic, dramaturgy, and the opposite of the middle. T.K. has poems in Novus Arts & Literature, Eastern Iowa Review, and Broad River Review.