POEMS FOR NOONE  

Things Happen Boy
“Then we are a beauty; a thing made from many parts.”

The breast slashes against the woolen window pane.

The grim cop rides past like an unabated horse. The air neighs.

“Things happen boy, they happen and jump on you before you can count to one. 
Nothin’ prepares you for it. 
You either is or you isn’t.”

For long moments we stared into the wafer thin boundaries that kept life from dying. 

"You find by breaking through what has found you."



Unrelenting Abyss
Oh poetry you unrelenting abyss/no one tells me how to cross you. 
I have left the apple orchards bare with a crazed dog chasing his shadow. 

The moonlight is an emergency casting slick dark on my face.
It drives its commands into me like a woman angered because now she knows she was cheated. 

And the other woman who I remember as a perfect form now cut up bloodlessly, 
speaking emphatically as one seeking power. 

Abyss, infinitesimal and gigantic as the mouth I dreamed about last night.
It did not have a cumbersome tongue but  neon signs in the teeth.
And I read each one as the mouth had its way with me. I was gone. Is this what it is?

It is worse than losing childhood. Every new child is a challenge to one’s own. 

It is like the old King who finally dies and the people put him on a burning ship. 
The flames are a silent cry into a distillate piece of matter called the Sun. 
Everything obeys the symmetry of things, even the cries. 

And the old poet tells me he’s not certain now whether “she was an angel or a witch. 

Maybe both.” 








Shadows

A world of floating shadows.

“Don’t let dem shadows catch ye unawares boy.”

All the life beaten out of them turn to shadows. Beware!

And da woman has ‘em and da man has ‘em.

And you, boy, will have ‘em.

“Run run boy, from those shadows.”










   
  

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