—Poems by Alan Britt, Reisterstown, MD
—Anonymous Photos
—Anonymous Photos
BILL . . . OR IS IT ZEN?
(For Tommy King, William Blake, & Walt Whitman)
Boar whiskers taste like afterthoughts.
Oil the way it mimics stained-glass windows
engulfing staircases gilded by walnut banisters’
scent of dead skin cells anointing humanity.
Saffron eyes rolled up to your rolled down
white Fairlane driver's side & whispered
something off the menu into your left ear;
you swiveled your Southern Comfort head
as I hailed a cab.
All kidding aside, the leopard enjoys
boar but doesn't enjoy killing it,
tusks like kitchen knives,
DNA helix reserved for solitary
leopards & occasional twin cheetahs
that come calling at worst possible
hours when a Kudu calf strays the herd
for extra sweet tufts of something
he or she will never know the name
of, yet risks everything for one
glorious moment of exquisite fiber,
knowing that twins come & go,
but tasting the moment, eternity
in a grain of sand, or leaf of grass,
is worth dying for.
DESTROY THIS TEMPLE
Destroy this temple & I'll ice-skate three days
across your godforsaken forehead.
Keep your mantis mitts, your freshly laundered,
beet-stained fingertips off my block of ice.
Keep your bloody collar to yourself.
Keep your Antiques Roadshow jade symbol
of ultimate creator/intellectual swinging
from your nakedness & mine researching the gunmetal
crevices of midday breasts carved to perfection
below florescent blues inside the Black Rooster Lounge
hours before our high school quarterback staggers out its
front door clutching his chest, liver bleeding, emptying his .38
into posters of German beer models & Southern Comfort.
From muddy ponds, snapping turtles bubble Mississippi adjectives
& Arkansas verbs.
Fusion of nature & language sheds momentary reality
like smegma or the dust from common moth wings;
so, I dissect reflections, geometric paradoxes
posing as king & queen. So much for that. The piano
grows shark teeth; goggle-eyed priests patrol the barnacled pilings;
seaweed tilts a young chin toward oxygen; saxophone, dented
& bruised, sax retaining dignity after centuries of humiliation,
& you ask the coffeemaker stainless steel plated with black petroleum
knobs to foretell what it’s told to foretell.
Violins lacerate shoulders, bare since birth, bare since
the tortoise & the hare, bare since Joan's head rolled down
sticky dimly lit movie aisles sponsored by First Federals
& failed National Banks; violins lacerate men with one thing
on their minds: When's our next meal!
Well, that makes two.
★ ♥ neglect ² (this is diminished)
Factory farming, factory education,
factory farming, ornamental fur collar adorns
the newest Supreme Court Justice (enemy of the state)
fist sinking below smoking pile
of injustice; woe is she who breaks
the spell sending sisters to the incinerator
before revealing her sterling pattern
of justice, before . . . . before . . . . before
& ages before that.
♠
A 14-carat locket with a cracked heart
is a 14-carat locket with a cracked heart.
♥
Love swirls her woolen scarf
from a taxi spraying NYC slush over the curb,
flows into a tavern of topless dancers
& hesitates before scooching her bamboo chair
below plastic netting melted by a flickering
globe with soot strangling its throat.
Love fluffs her skirt to reveal a diamond netting
of her own. The music
i
n
s
i
d
e makes
the doorman vomit outside. But strobe lights bruise
rattlesnake hips & emancipated breasts undulating
promises of nasty love.
Bombers in the bedroom giving Mick the shits.
Nickname says give me your underbelly;
underbelly says give me your nickname first,
satisfaction guaranteed.
Supreme Court says don't waste tax dollars
on morality—long-term rewards, notwithstanding,
return on investment is dismal at best
& futile at worse like a soggy Irish match head ripped
from a strip of tavern matches, flaps bent
to imitate nihilism that roams the ether world
[to echo a little-known German Symbolist
in an age when German Symbolists
were under suspicion for all sorts of crimes:
undressing in public, walking pet lobsters
along the Champs-Élysées (oops),
or storing too much grain for a Siberian winter,
or, heaven forbid, demanding the entire
Gulf of Mexico be returned to its natural state
by calendar year 2014 & counting, not discounting].
The way things are going, I'll be 2,068,017 years old
before seeing improvement on the humanitarian front,
much less witnessing PhDs in empathy offered
at any public institution.
Lemon-lime parakeet with cobalt smudged cheeks
scratches newspaper photos of the royal wedding
before its squish of wet putty blinds one grainy royal eye
while the other oblivious eye waves to all the poor bastards
who'll underwrite her life of extreme luxury for the next
50 years or so, give or take.
POEM YOU’RE ADVISED NOT TO READ CAREFULLY
I walk around, today,
all misty-eyed.
Why do you do that?
How the hell do I know?
But you said . . .
I know what I said,
and I don’t know.
That’s all there is to it.
Do you fantasize about transcending melancholy?
Assuming escape is a remote possibility—
melancholy scanning the horizon
with its oscillating buzzard vision
haunting the thermals of a low grade fever,
melancholy, pansophical, and flocked
by the omnipresent angels of despair.
Not likely.
___________________
Today’s LittleNip:
THURSDAY NIGHT, EARLY JUNE
—Alan Britt
Working his brain to bits & farming too,
said the 6th grader who had to rhyme
but changed his mind just in thyme.
Said a rain-soaked garden hose, coiling
mass of garters. Said the cardinal appearing
two poems ago challenging a Poulenc catbird
whose chirrups resembled the sandpaper
screeches of drunken cicadas smearing
a tropical storm’s gypsy mascara across
the wandering eyelids of dusk.
* * *
& that’s how four goldfinch cucumber
trumpets embrace the anaconda rain!
______________________
Our thanks to Alan Britt from Maryland for today’s fine poems!
SPEAK UP returns to Sacramento tonight, 7pm at the Avid Reader, with poets and storytellers speaking up about the theme, “Rendezvous”. Scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info about these and other upcoming poetry events in our area—and note that more may be added at the last minute.
—Medusa
Celebrate poetry!
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.
