Poetry

A burly country bumpkin, Bald as an autumn pumpkin, Sat – in his cups – at home. Some kind of fly, a-winging, Time and again kept stinging His unprotected dome. Each time the pest would land, The peasant smashed his hand Smartly against his head. Just as the bug would bite him, He tried in…

The blue breeze spins In near-still swirls Away from land. A gull lifts off The dull brown pier, Then works its wings And scales itself In sidelong glide Downwind, down wind Alone, black-tipped Wings its way up Through a soft scale Like a mild dream Balanced on sleep. Then, blood-beak poised On molecules Of sea…

Nights flex. You occur to me like morning’s sketchy moon: a surprising intimate. I lapse into you delirious as a drive into rain. Something you say is your hand, opening, inside me. You have to sleep alone to dream. . . Who can remember, counting backwards, the logic of snow. Leaves shake their fists, the…

“What obsessed Hieronymus Bosch was not simply sadism but interpenetration and particularly cutting,” chittered the ferret as she sipped her espresso and picked at a napoleon

You starve yourself, your body as essential as the crust off a bread. Not me – I’m the whole loaf. I rise and fall. I tease the clock. A proud machetti tears me open, warm, white, steaming. Stuffed with tuna, devilled egg, curled like an intestine, I am greedy, Every pink pimento is a fleck…

I ought to have a good opinion of myself but from my unlucky education I cannot get rid of a mean timidity as to my own worth. I was very genteelly lodged. And then the century garbage: full of prying, deceitful, hateful people named geikie, bailie, ritchie or some other name It ends in -ie…

Don’t worry about my tongue being a biscuit of dust. Don’t think about my pillow which is filled with quinine. I don’t. My malaria is not contagious, nor is it hereditary. Why do I walk bent over like this? Because when they operated to remove my malaria, and found nothing, they became bitter and sewed…

Let us remember that unsung breed who send my likes to you – wisely: Van Elliott, Bert Kelsey, Fred Weed of Roxbury Latin; and the likes of Feathereye Mykey my uncle did so unknowingly. Let me remember thresholds left here to cross yours there; remember the clutter of the place that’s Feathereye’s junkshop where I…

I received a very formal invitation: written on an anvil, her name flew by me. A soliloquy was given. Pieces of barbed wire were lifted, like flags. Of course, the necessary wafer salted with magnesium was passed around. When she first spoke I summoned immediately the bondsman for the indignant. Believe me, I never knew…