I’m a river,
or perhaps
a glowing vacuum tube.
And she’s a radio tuner.

So I’ll split my face
upon the rocks,
drag amperes full of fish;
amplify Earth’s frequencies,

catch electrons in my fist–
while she, bandless,
strolls the banks,
looking for a switch.

Gavin W Sisk
Dec. 2019

This flummoxing affliction.
Cries carom off the bedroom door
and box his father’s ears:
an invitation to mad Martians
who march with coffers of roses
with thorns, which he fears.
“It’s bad! It’s ruined! I want it!
It’s gone! I need it! I need it!”
His terror grinds like rusted gears.
This inclement condition of a
knife drawn through his dreams,
of the permanence it shears.
A box of hand-grenades
is in his head, and the pins
fall from his face as tears.

Gavin W Sisk
Nov. 2017

If I were a star I would explode! 
And whatever was the matter 
would not matter.
My strafing of the galaxies
with particles and frequencies
would make me God.
Though I might be misunderstood, 
by default I would be right.

Gavin W Sisk

Young, I raced through summers in bare feet,
through sunburned fields with clover-crazy bees,
over shards of brown glass pushed to mounds
as alters heaped by mad old men cast down

to share their pain with an oblivious child.
Soap, a stiff brush, Mercurochrome, a smile:
salves for cuts from countless careless flights
across the scraps of countless shadowed lives.

Are paper, pencils, promises, and prayer;
silver clouds, the golden rule, our faith in fair;
sex, song, and vows to live in vivid view
of fields unmarred by mounded dreams askew

bars enough against brigades of venial sin
that live and somehow arm and aim to swim
and swarm through windows of our present tense
and change our songs of flight to dissonance?

Gavin W Sisk

A mind parsed
to laminar flows.
The sea waves,
fish wind in nets,
while hearts render
to their elements.
Love tonight what
spills tomorrow
into rivers that
forever scroll.

May, 2014