Joe Morton Was a Pain in the Ass, So Was His Wife Annie
Okay. A story sails from here. Headline - we've nailed-up ambition,
taking witness statements contrary to events silence witnesses.
Silence stands in the tongues of a grasshopper,
in the gardens of Eden (plural) being a wish so thin water washed it clean of its hope
then drank our money from our banks,
pissed honey-gold piss. Grasshoppers spoke a longest parable,
fields like arms attached for the first time to the serpent
who now directs the movie made from water, honey, filed-down credit cards,
and a burning ambition.
Walter was a poet I'd hoped would make it back home after the war.
I saw Walter round town, stopping to collect his paper,
clips around his ankles are a smart choice.
Walter may not be the one we'd suspected, all along I'd seen him from my window
and the street buckled beneath the lyrics heavy from his tongue.
Walter was an angel really, he kept perfect time in a jazz band.
Walking back from the fifth dimension, litter's strewn everywhere.
The fourth dimension is a bad bad town. No room for growth.
People walk out from their party, champagne glasses shaking their discretions across a velvet lawn.
The grass was so blue, I’d wondered if we should go to Kentucky and start taking statements.
That’s where we’ll find the killer.
I pause. It was here, Joe Morton fell clutching his chest, asking his wife Annie to call his accountant first,
then an ambulance, the priest was Annie’s quirk. Christ almighty, I whisper,
Joe Morton was a pain in the ass.
I gave his daughter a fifty, then another, told her to drive Joe to Córdoba,
I’d watched him live so much when I wasn’t around, I figured the air in Córdoba would finish him for good.
It's Early
After Forrest Gander
The squeak of his shoe sings loudest
when he stops it from walking,
music is burning in the trees -
sunrise is catching fire earlier now, when the sun has something to live for -
prayer, a good diet, more rock n'roll than I could swallow.
Television was beautiful enough to kill itself last night,
allow my wife and me time to make it to the border,
we didn't say a word to the faces clasping to their lives,
these people would start a forest fire with a glass of water, she said
Thunder and Lightning
LIghtning says so long suckers to its heaviest trouble,
to throw away women who lie and men
who kill and tiny shards of children
who know they walk through a life of danger,
having the loudest procession follow them to their death;
only a mind as drunk as thunder
could stand there and face these squalid things,
first thing in the morning, fat with time, and ugly as an empty bottle
lightning jumps though,
ready for the autopsies to bend
like anklebones in potholes; lightning sang me the song of the wickedest blues man
who hid his boots beneath my feet to let the devil come take me,
in that year of our lord nineteen hundred and thirty-six,
it was the thunder that came to save me,
blowing down the backbone of my door,
and I ran so fast, the light became a confessor of dark,
thunder growling its prayer
through my smoke-drizzled footsteps
If I Was the D.A. I’d Have Called it Manslaughter
Isn't it wild how this calm milk sky
says no to planes who made their marble halls so immune,
then this calm milk sky bites in teeth of lightning at rain that brews up our penance?
The day is a symbol of darkness within, the cold television's war with lives
that escape to snitching gardens, where, the lunatics of the pissing moon
smoke their dope and their weed and worry about rats of many kinds -
day is a piece of broken web spiders seal our sonnets with,
the rats are grasping at the apples from the forbidden trees
years above her cracked garden. Airplanes are as oblivious as sorrow will let them,
no-one should throw televisions through hotel windows - because death - that green-nosed rat -
refuses to replace our shot-down cowboys.
When she rides home to Arkansas, she'll make that saloon her first port of call,
music is drunker than darkness, and preachers fall down staircases into wicked Tuesday
on the sidewalk of a swelling solar system. I rub my finger through the dusk,
pulling the moon across my thumb I spy her lighting up something an officer
of the peace was kind enough to ignore at customs. Her customs are that of an odd tribe
not far from the murmurs of airplane scratching cloud,
television's day drowning in a new sermon. I see she wore those peach sunsets today,
sadder than
a photo of a broken city they were, and twice as likely to turn feral
John Doyle is from County Kildare in Ireland. He returned to writing poetry in February 2015 after a gap of nearly 7 years. Since then he's had 7 poetry collections published. His 7th collection, "Isolated Incidents" was published by Pski's Porch in Summer 2021.
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