Sunrise
Sugar canes red, yellow, green,
Whitening porcelain roots atop bed wood
Roses railing daisies raising bumblebees
Raising worms which drop robins
From bouncing perches clung by
Sleepy squirrels watching for the hawk
Shadow that lifts pigeons from
Their rock niches and flutter
Wings waking the cardinal, bluebird,
And sparrows to witness dandelion
Seeds drift across the colouring
Field that memories new space.
The Grave Robber
You exhumed me from a silent casket,
Shovelling with your flat spade,
Hair stuck in all directions,
Grill-cage eyes open and waiting.
When I stepped out of the hole,
A lane of gravestones led me to
A hanger-type building brightly ballooned
With smiling faces of whispering teenagers.
The classroom greened with washed blackboard
As if I were in Warren city;
Students gawked at my paisley tie,
Alphabetically lifting arms to names.
I had been lowered in the untongued box,
Where splinters festered under fingernails
Maggoting my throat-skin from vocal chords;
Staring up at the downturned faces.
A waxing moon sank and I exchanged
My three-piece suit for tweed and khakis;
The sun reddened as I transformed,
Sporting jeans and a denim shirt.
Sometime into a Venusian transit,
The rains that lasted days began,
And the space between the windows and desks
Puddled footprints toward the door.
When your essays were corrected in red,
The podium’s neck algebraic wood,
Memory was mine as mercury rose;
My popularity balsamicked but not needed.
I was finally given the skunk works,
A roadside canal with a rotting cow carcass,
The shit-loaded sewer under a slum,
The effluvium of unphysicked barrios.
I want my mouth stuck with splinters,
My mind mathed into coffined schematic,
The exponential expanse of a closed lid,
The eulogy read and tossed away.
Escaping the Millennium Bug
Beginning with a computer I bought six-years ago
My credit card has never stopped running away with my money,
Multiplying exponentially like the fornicating population
Of an under-educated third-world country.
A month after my new Mac I needed a new shirt,
But had no green because I paid my minimum,
Then I could not buy my girl champagne,
Nor take my other girl out to dinner.
Has AIDS hit my plastic as it reached its limit,
A disease that my penicillin paycheck no longer cures?
If I had kept the card sheathed inside my wallet,
Would it have withered or gone completely flaccid,
No longer producing semen from lack of use?
Or would the identity have worn off from jean friction,
Sprouted hairs along the edge,
Unmagnetized and no longer pheromoned?
My life was more simple when I used cash,
When no one could trace my nightly prowlings
To singles’ bars and liquor stores, and now adult book stores
And motels fucked-in by the hour.
I would like to cut it in half,
But feel emasculated without my leather-jacket,
My whiskey, my car to take me out of the city
Away from the acridity of prostitute cunts.
I shall declare war on its weapon of mass destruction,
Invade it, give it a military tribunal,
Incarcerate it in the neutral corner of a desk drawer,
Torture and burn it for the history I credited.
Building a Beach-House
Even though I hate you,
You jumped in the sea when I was drowning,
And there returned me my legs
That I might plant them in sand
And not be violently ill, tossed
About the surface like loosed kelp
Waiting to dissolve into salt and sunlight,
Or bitten and passed through fish gullet.
I hope this sand is not weakened
By a denuded coral base,
Or oil-slimed sea-worm tunnels
And chlorine-bleached sand dollars.
I have yet to firm with barnacles
And reroute thermal sulphur tubes,
To tropically colour with angel fish,
And reef to keep ships out bay.
Off to War Again
The Marines awarded me two silver stars,
But you demoted me to six stripes.
On the ship your troops were readied:
Helmeted and flak-jacketed they covered and aligned
As the deck keeled new direction
And the stern flag changed colours.
My Russian training had prepared me for this
Though I paused from falling in rank.
I could have read it on the ticker
Had I kept my ass on the bridge.
I saved my mates from a security breach
By modifying the chow cart’s labels,
Then teaching them how to start the motor
By turning buttons and pushing knobs.
But when you began to move it laden,
And the regiment columned behind,
I defollowed when I could not find
My right high-top canvas sneaker.
You disembarked but quickly scrambled
When smart missiles toppled into the sea:
The topaz banner you brought back
Floated across-deck on a torrid wind,
Unfurled into an intake valve
That spewed caustic roses ankle deep.
Stephen Page is part Native American. He was born in Detroit. He holds degrees from Palomar College, Columbia University, and Bennington College. He has 4 books of poetry published. He loves his wife, long walks through woodlands, nature, solitude, peace, meditating, spontaneous road trips, motorcycles, smashing cell phones with hammers, dog-earing pages in books, and making noise with his electric bass.
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