BEAUTIFUL BOY
(For
the Gingerbread Boy)
Beautiful
gingerbread boy cracking
Oh, snap! causing the girls
to rise
&
sway as though dancing, only
not
dancing but sociologically
invading
my Kuiper Belt of flesh
that
senses everything time has
to
offer, time involving a stainless
steel
oven & two sons on the run.
Don’t
let me down—not this time
or
forever—don’t let me down.
[first published in GloMag (India) 2019]
CHANGE
Kisses bruise the eyelid of a cataract moon.
Mango
light blazes from the second-story
window of
a whitewashed clapboard house.
Court
jester in drawstrings croons
the
cruelest month with his sideburns
gleaming
like perfectly buffed
cherry 1967
Camaro fenders.
It
could be a dog—yes, it is a dog,
hand-clapped
& called by name,
a
hound, terrier or herding mix
who curls
beside us for comfort
in the
dead of winter—if one were
to
dissect its barks, one might discover
layer
upon layer hickory, oak, maple,
& a
touch of dogwood thrown in
for
good measure.
Too
often we observe a phenomenon
&
call it magical, but it’s not;
sometimes
it’s just what it is.
Change.
LAST CHANCE
Last chance to dream a wireless cactus
guarding
the border between hope & despair.
Razor
wire cactus.
Last
chance to believe one is impervious
to
common decency—it’s the static that
gets
me—but conglomerate algorithmic
crude
not so much.
I’ve
withstood floods, shifting states of mind,
&
expectations pinned like butterflies
against
the lapels of Nobel Laureates.
I ate
dinner with an extinct diminutive short
pronged
mammal for millennia, along
with my
Neanderthal cousins.
I
soiled the onionskin pages of early,
modern
& contemporary Christianity
&
lived to talk about it.
But,
today, I’m too exhausted to commence
with
existence like a wasp in my doughboy
helmet,
wasp that stung me with a garden
shed
& kitchen drawer full of green trading
stamps
that amounted to pretty much what
no one
expected them to amount to.
Still,
that’s not what I meant earlier; what
I meant
earlier is that I’ve just spotted a
category
five, & if I know what’s good for
me
tonight, I’ll orbit the moonlit thermals
like
crushed roach tablets sheltering our military
graveyards
until someone flips me upside
down
like an hourglass & dumps me
into
William Blake’s heaven or Arthur
Rimbaud’s
hell.
[first published in Big Windows Review 2019]
ODE TO AN INCENSE TILE
The incense tile is blind
as she scooches beside me
during my dream.
I don’t know whether to fall
in love or to grow scales,
seeing as how it’s all
a fairytale, anyway.
It’s 2002, the season
for religious abuse,
so, I check my illusions at the altar
and stroll
the hollowed-out paradigms
of one thousand generations,
past lichen-covered philosophies
in search of a sober existence.
And just about then a wooden match
flickering its ladybug wings
sizzles the tip of one patchouli stick
that flashes like a lighthouse
before coughing up a lazy lotus
of blue smoke.
[earlier version first published in New Gravity 2015]
THIS IS
HOW TUESDAYS WERE MEANT TO BE
(Or enjoying the *Savoy
Truffle)
I think
I’m in estrous or something—
ice
cubes slithering my shoulder blades and down my back
leaving
a trail of leopard slugs to fend for themselves.
Warren
Haynes’ Gibson Les Paul like heat lighting
flashing
the palmettoes.
Meanwhile,
the Savoy Truffle, white herons or heroin clinking false teeth
into
the bathroom sink like a forgotten icon with skull encased in amber.
Well, the
Savoy Truffle, years later a dentist
or
psychiatrist lounging beneath the armpits
of
banana palms lining the intimate cocktail
square
of civilization left
after
certain unmentionables
have
fleeced the environment
with
their pitch-black toxic plumes
of
smoke rising from refinery stacks,
refinery
stacks like Tinkertoys lining the horizon, or, heaven
forbid,
that insidious battery balanced upon Robert Conrad’s shoulder
in one
of those primitive, archetypal, Duracell commercials:
Go ahead, knock that fucker off!
[Thank
you, *George Harrison]
Alan Britt poems have
appeared in Agni Review, American Poetry Review, The Bitter Oleander,
Cottonwood, Kansas Quarterly, Midwest Review, Missouri Review, New Letters,
Osiris, and Stand (UK). His latest book is Emergency Room,
2022, from Pony One Dog Press. He has published 21 books of poetry and served
as Art Agent for Andy Warhol Superstar, the late great Ultra Violet, while
often reading poetry at her Chelsea, New York studio. A graduate of the Writing
Seminars at Johns Hopkins University he currently teaches English/Creative
Writing at Towson University.
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