talktooloose

An act of poetry has occurred this morning. This is still a draft, but I'm too lazy to wait.

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Purity Ball

Market tumbles in pandemic panic
Screaming streets of airbag warriors
Donning dollar-store masks
To plunge into the jungle

They dive deep into the humid crotch of the world
Zipped and sanitized
Laminated guide books and UltraViolet GPS
They seek a new Eden
A way back
A perfect location for the perfect franchise

The explorer has days of tedium to reflect on it all
How did we come to this?
Blame the ones who lay down with swine
On dusty farms, ravaged by agro biz
In huts in falling forests where static Seinfeld quips in Portuguese
In the desperate hygiene of the brokerage
In the circus swami tent of the mortgage men
In the bedroom drawers where vibrating Jesus waits his turn

On the seventh day
The valley opens at their feet
The falls cascading into eternity green
Tears fog their goggles
Their screams of exultation
Carry across the valley
Like so many pteradons

At the crumbling edge of catharsis
They search the index for meaning
They google truth off a satellite
They have a group hug
And heave in their spacesuits

Kurtz crying, "The purity! The purity!"

Huh. I seem to have finished a poem that's been kicking around for awhile. I also wrote a new song which is the first in a long time. I've been writing so much long-form prose that my psyche must have been jonesing for the density of verse. Here's the poem:


Stanzas on the Subway

He holds her with apostrophes,
With italics,
With public solicitation
And a bumper sticker:
She is mine
She is mine
And look how I cherish
With cursive strokes
And muscly flexes
Of my clever hand

It's all flagrant lip
service, of course.
To the preening boy
The girl is mere object,
Subject and theme.

But she knows her worth
And the metric limits of his
Big blind love:
Roll me off your
Tongue tonight
And again a thousand nights
I'll be no more than
You can see
Than what you already found
In me

Regret everything;
Don't get waylaid by
Rogue hopes.

Yonge & Bloor
Where rich and poor,
Prig and boor,
Turk and Moor
Hunt for lucre,
Sniff its spoor