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Five Poems
by
Cello I’ll never learn to play the cello now now that I’ve learned how to shoot a gun. My body got strange when I shot it. My body made music which was good because the birds flew away leaving you with your beauty as private as a bullet and the rain beginning to shine like broken bottles.
* * * Gasoline I keep thinking about those gasoline sniffing children in the wastes of Canada the yellow plastic bags full of gasoline clutched against their parkas like those inflatable toys that keep luckier children afloat on lakes on holidays but it is fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit and it’s all the Mounties can do to keep the stoned children from freezing to death or setting themselves on fire among the drained carcasses of snowmobiles and the shacks where the parents sleep it off.
* * * Clear Sky The clear sky makes you cheerful like completing a simple puzzle.
Everything fits. There’s nothing more to take care of.
No burrs on the dog. No family farmers going under.
No muscles atrophying. No fresh-faced TV sitcom child stars turning up in porn.
No porn. Everyone making love modestly.
You are normal. You are pleased with yourself.
All your enemies are on vacation. All the laws are being written by cherubim with big fat crayons.
* * * Stunt Double Woe is in the details. I wake up and stink. I pray for hot water and answering that prayer distracts God from another landmine in the playground of the poor. I turn on the tap. The water wheezes like a geezer with cataracts admiring me instead of the star. My muscles are bored. I live where continuity is drunk and the director says shit shit shit. I jump from the car beginning its cartwheel over the cliff and it shows up later all new and shimmering like the dress of flames I wear.
* * * The Moon Dogs are distant cousins to shame out in the back yards constantly burying what the rain uncovers if they had hands they would be bad spellers typing in the night their scruffy prose overtaking the computer screens like kudzu or nutria or some other nonindigenous species but dogs themselves are indigenous almost everywhere and we mostly love them the way we love the moon which keeps the world from shifting into bare rock.
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