Friday, August 8, 2014

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

city love

                                 
                               city air enveloped the midnight street
                               wrapped in sable stockings
                               beyond your feline waist
                                I cast my tongue into your quaint abyss again
                               at night
                               pigeons dance 'pon our soiled bedroom sill 
                               deep urban shadows pounce through sacred windows 
                               as neighborhood breezes subtly dance 'tween our bodies
                               this twentieth century mattress
                               rests silently
                              disembodied from its sheets
                               your heat
                               penetrated my psyche once again
                               as sultry evening foreshadowed
                               a seasons culminating humidity
                               in inertial premonition

                               lackluster in love
                               what love is
                               me cresting your auburn brow
                              'neath a ceiling fan's vigorous oscillation
                             refrigerator wednesdays outside
                             village popsicle vendors   
                            air conditioned feelings
                            within your mother's embryonic vestibule
                            afternoon must gradually unfold
                            today toward placid evening
                           august will delicately transpire to september
                            city love must never dwindle
                            through our years
                            freshly renewing our minds within each other
                           while death continues slithering up
                           adjacent alleyways
                           slowly making its way to our city door
                              
                            
                             
                             
                                     
                                
                               
                            
                                 
                              

For Miss Mcmanus

  Dear Miss Mcmanus:
                                           
                                               After callously venturing through restless seasons of the world
                                               you've alone embedded your name
                                               upon the narrow landing of its crystalline mantle
                                               in return
                                              I've constructed an perpetual altar for you
                                              upon the familiar throne of my heart
                                               all I ask
                                                is to gradually mount life's trivial staircase with you
                                              your elemental eyes widened with fire, love & grace
                                              how i long to belong somewhere between your legs
                                              and your face
                                              autumn winds will blow
                                              long before the pine-trees know
                                              their boughs to wither
                                              in fallen winter snow

                                             an ethereal Springtime
                                             you are to me or
                                            long forgotten solstice of summer
                                            whence childhood dreams
                                            painted a tranquil sheen
                                            of pastel indigo
                                            on our minds impressionable harbor
                             
                                             our love together
                                             is beyond any vale I've ever traveled
                                             more precious and delicate
                                             than any prayer
                                             mumbled fervently
                                             in lone bedrooms of adolescence
                                           
                                             angels drift beyond measure here
                                              their words soft and amiable
                                              whitened & velvet
                                             clutching nighttime silhouettes
                                              you
                                              must be one of them
                                             
                                                                                            Your lover
                                                                                                       Dan Pollock

                                             

Saturday, April 26, 2014

thought it would be nice

                     thought it would be nice to pay homage to our memory together
                    as nocturnal ravens crept over your velvet shoulder
                     into holy weeks
                     amid dry infertile seasons
                     there were
                     neighborhood eyes on you
                     transcending the nighttime sky
                     igniting a social confligaration
                     of vapid constellations
                     we clambered into amphetamine bathtubs
                     sheathed in linoleum midnight
                     while deceased family vestiges
                     danced beside a darkened radiator
                 
                     schoolchildren that fell from grace
                     we were
                     usurping our way to carpeted heavens
                     of importune domestication
                     through futile labor
                     we moaned the folly of our lesson
                     your eastern hair
                     darkling to crimson
                     then
                     back again in pigtails
     
                     your brothers hated me
                     and
                     I agreed with them
                     beforehand
                     of the costs
   
                    you were more beautiful
                    when you were mine
                 
                     thought it would be nice
                     to leave behind
                     all we ever were
                     all we ever
                     would have become
                     and write about it 
                      
                 
                      
                     
                   
                  
                    
                     
                   
              

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

I saw you and your friends

                         I saw you laughing with your friends last night at the local diner
                         beneath bulb fluorescent lighting
                        spraying tepid coffee from either nostril
                        as the uniformed waitress moped in sullen anticipation of your order
                        what bad direction
                        as neighborhood phone lines infiltrated penitentiary eulogies
                        down sewage rainwater gutters
                        what futile drainage as
                        solitary mornings ponder
                        A.M.  rattling through deserted streets
                        in the filthy pigeon bacteria epoch
                        I saw your older brother
                        lying dead on his feet
                        amid this sloppy trail of a city

                        I saw you with your friends in an evening subway car
                        migrating wayward through the badlands
                        digging up jail-yard skeleton corpses
                        miles deep within centuries of infertile soil
                        collapsed skyscrapers and inbred corpses
                        among hermaphrodite necrophiliacs
                        in the frostbitten year
                        of the stem-cell dragon
 
                       I went to visit you and your friends at the vernacular cemetery
                       on the outskirt of town
                       in placid afternoon
                       as dank moss covered your tombstone
                       within embryonic springtime
                       all the poems you never wrote
                      plagued my memory
                       as I exited through the broken gates
                       back into existence
                     
                       
                     

             


                 
                         
                       

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

out on life and its lonely highway

                              
                                 traveling down life's lonely highways
                                  hand in hand
                                 with every dehydrated desert pilgrim
                                    that ever drearily sauntered
                                     below radioactive
                                     tangerine moons gone clementine
                                     and
                                     bloodily phosphorescent 
                                     southern seasonal migrant workers
                                     all migrated north
                                      outta this vacant roadside town
                                     decades ago
                                     in sullen stem-cell years
                                     of sourly grenadine aftermath
                                     diseased horses and rusted microwaves gone
                                      rustic and defunct
                                      bleary eyed and DOA 
                                       from the baseboard outlet
                                       to the deadened pistol-whipped hatchback outskirt
                                       hillbilly locals rocked to and fro upon weathered bar stools
                                       rotted down
                                       to the withered oaken rooted floorboard
                                       splattered with cheap domestic beer
                                       stained with infidel
                                       semen
                                     
                                       

                                        old myrtle hayes triggered his high school sweetheart
                                        one quaint evening in an
                                        olden four door sedan
                                       off on the dusted shoulder of one of these broken roads
                                          as the vernacular has it
                                           he never made it home to his fridge that night
                                               guilt overtook him
                                         pushing up daisies somewhere down along route 409
                                             the invisible brink of the old abandoned quarry
                                          the other side of those grim county lines
                                          where the illiterate deputy
                                              that imminent hour
                                            sweated no drop of blood
                                                in no garden and
                                                 was ever so apologetic and grateful
                                                  he could write it all off
                                                    as a double homicide    
                                  
                                
                                    
                               
                                     
      

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

ambling home from your house last night

Ambling home from your house last night                            
the dimmed nighttime streets lulled and muddy
 juvenescent springtime dreamed itself softly
unraveling amid sacred flower-bedding
 once played upon as lost adolescents
frolicking throughout forlorn shadows of deceased imagery
the old abandoned playhouse remained riddled and voluminous
disillusioned years hung grimly among spectral notions of tawny fluorescent bulbing
take me back to your azure childhood rhododendron garden
where father initially entered your suburban back door
 sullenly raping you into frostbitten winters
when dysfunctional school time Christmas pageantry marked the inevitable end
to indecent juvenile pastimes
the shoreline beach at St. Augustine that Summer
you in a violet two piece bathing suit
downy drifts of ocean sand falling between your tanned feet
lethargic afternoons of pastel daytime
darkened evenings along the city outskirt
peering over the electrically lit metropolitan perimeter
creepy Uncle Frankie's rusted four-door station wagon
rows and rows of blooming juniper in your mothers household garden
moonlit serenades through dead aunt Stacy's trailer park
and Jim Beam's recreational Sunday skyline
recreating days when karaoke was fun or at least not knowing any better
this year has been a cruel macabre playpen
for Satan's binmen
take me home from flowering Judas
into pallid motherly arms
of the woman who kills me
yet gives a fuck