I remember standing there,
leaning by a shirtless man
holding spanners and a beer,
near crankshaft shadows
twisting and crawling in the sun.
Watched a young kid’s arm
argue with the starter rope
of a broken old gas mower.
No spark, no grass to cut,
just a boy in need of sweat.
Used water pump: ten bucks.
Even saved the old gasket.
Sunburned half my white ass
cursing the part into place.
Finished just in time to toast
the sunset on my lovely lawn.
April, 2013
He fears the sun, lawn sprinklers,
and my evening practice swings.
(But not my cat.)
Quiet as the haze on his back,
he draws the darkness to his chin
like a super-hero’s cape.
(This super-hero tips my trash!)
Will his wife find him at dawn–
drunk from tainted runoff
and bloated by discarded yams–
forgive him missing supper,
push him home to mind the kids?
April, 2013
It’s not a need for death,
but sleep:
without the cut
of waking up against the heat of
endless days;
us,
dragging broken lives
over tangled ill intent and lies.
Woken hours adore hot sun;
break bread,
share red wine,
sweat in folds of satin sheets,
glow in ink of short regrets
left tied
under scented pillows—
afternoons shed minutes
singly.
Cool rain diffuses day-end hues;
attempts sedation
with a fugue
but cleans and polishes the pain.
Drag me up the talus slope
so rocks can scrape away
my sins
as dry old skins of past regrets.
I’ll leave nights of
brambled moons,
wake in rough-hewn
afternoons;
walk in pain
but breath in billows.
For a friend.
Gavin W Sisk
May 2014
Fallen ranks of red:
stamen spent, petals bent,
septum perrianders
mined to renderless;
now a trail of fragile
crumbs cracked brown,
to be ground to dust
while the clock sweats.
Hand over hand it hauls
from east to west to
test the moon’s resolve
to cool each bloom
and wake a hope
where hopeless rests.
Feb, 2013
For the girls on Ida Street who wait for Spring’s first bulbs to push unstoppably against the last winter winds: something from my poetry compost bin, where wads of words and scrapped stanzas wait for recycling and rebirth. Happy Saint Valentine’s Day.
Gardens
Some of us have gardens,
but they’re difficult to find.
Look for rich dark soil,
seeds, bugs, flitting wrens,
twitching tails of stealthy cats,
turning forks, watering cans,
and string-tied straw hats.
Smell the breath of thyme
slowed across a dappled path.
Listen for praise by neighbors
leaning on a picket fence.
Until you find all that,
a garden might look like
a rusted Easy-Bake Oven,
or an old Toyota with a flat.
It’s a matter of serving
your senses, like cooking.
Yes, it should be like that—
without French fries and
pennies under the front seat.
Feb. 14, 2013
Pickets, cyclone, thicket, larch
capitulate to words unlatched,
loosed to brush a bleeding strap:
sunset cirrus clouds stretched tight
in watercolor worlds she writes.
For my daughter, Hana.
Feb. 2013
Tonight my mind is trapped in a sound-proof room,
thought-proof also, even golf-proof.
Golf-proof: not to be driven from my mind
(requiring a putt at best).
Sound-proof, except for the tinnitus:
the two discordant notes ignorant of sound-proofing,
immune to atom bombs and rock and roll,
disrespectful of rest, faithless to comas,
resistant to poetry, and persistent to death
(though I hope not).
Thought-proof: now, certainly.
Jan. 27, 2013
Birth, death, and the moments in between: all good stuff to write about. Sometimes a good noun or verb and a simple image will get me started. Sometimes I need something extra: an interlocutor or proxy to courier difficult ideas from the noise in my head to the quietness of a blank page.
Animals have served this role for artists and writers for millennia. Really, almost anything on the other side of the imaginary wall which separates humans from nature can be anthropomorphized in service to disclosing what is too close to see. My interlocutor is my cat, Rosie.
Rosie in Bed
Rosie protests
my reading in bed.
She pushes books
out of my hands
and purrs,
“Read me instead!”
March 2012
Left for the day.
Forgot to feed the cat.
Bitching, moaning, whining,
and plodding like a miniature calico
draft horse around her empty kibble bowl.
Goddamn my sorry hairless Homosapien soul!
Filled the bowl and tickled her ticked-off nose—
hedged with a herring carcass on the heap.
Mea culpa. Cope with my caresses, Miss.
Don’t finger me your twitchy tail.
No, you took a bite or two,
pranced to the door,
left for the night.
Jan. 2013
A brass ring hooked and
slipped into her purse,
with the credit cards
and the plastic case
with the oblong pills.
A journey to the center
of her pendulating heart.
French Antilles blue framed
by fuming hurricanes
does not un-map the strain.
Unforgiven adolescence
is a cultivated state,
and brass rings don’t shine
in the bottom of a bag.
Nov. 2012
A Literary Journal
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A Satirical Word In Your Shell-Like Ear
inken thought
Musings on poetry, language, perception, numbers, food, and anything else that slips through the cracks.
what if poems could be symphonies, and people their orchestra?
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