A Memphis Introspective

Forgot all but your spine-rattles
Under garments, white
You filed your talons
On my houndstooth jacket
We sat through marble
And pall altars
Foiled were our plans
Mapped without jurisdiction
Where does the heart turn
Against bristling earshot
Where does the mouth meld
With symbolic alignment
Zippered, with no aim
Bruising, flapping adverbs
Binding woe in the slats
Of the Memphis sun

Church Wall Jesus

Daddy doesn't like robots
The words fell organic
Onto the plate and pitched camp with peas and carrots

Mommy hallucinated church-wall Jesus
Over the high branches of Oak Hill

And it was well with her soul
Jerry never came home
Her baby lost in the trusses of a million highways
And daddy never came home any more
Stranded, of mind, in the annex behind the laundry room

Welts formed on the family name
"I've had an experience."
"Yes."
"I've had an experience and I don't trust myself any longer."
"Describe this experience."
"My nails ran white with time, grown adequately to pick pennies from
Mother Earth's embrace."
"Yes."
"She sent me wrath long disguised."
"Have you shopped genres? Have you nodded in time only to save critiques
for the pillow?"
"I think I'm done here."

Abner Jay

I was born during the hard Depression days, O my Lord. In July in south Georgia, where the sun was hot as a blaze. My folks were sharecroppers. At the end of the year, we had nothing, we had nothing. We had nothing but grasshoppers. Looking back over my life, O Lord, I'm so depressed. Help me somebody, I need some rest. O Lord, I'm so depressed. Every boy needs a girl. Every girl needs a boy. I'm a boy so full of love. I have no one to hold my hand. Tell me how long must I wander. Tell my how long must I cry. Will I meet someone? Someone to wipe, dry the tears from my eye? Come on baby, rub my head! Rub my head while I lay down in my bed! Kiss, kiss me! Kiss me baby 'til I feel alright! 'Til I feel alright! Hey! O looking back over my life, O Lord, I'm so depressed. Help me somebody, I need some rest. O Lord, I'm so depressed.

warper

I skimmed 1,000 car grills and
trolled infinitely along the lines of conversations
And I don't find it difficult to write
poems and I don't wrestle with its
ease. I duly cringe at my own
outpourings and swallow the
residual drifting feelings.
I studied the topography of my
mother's scalp through the strands
of her fleeting hair and I felt fourth
grade in a nutshell

"What's a Bidet, Player?"

I went crazy for 12 hours
my dreams bubbled over
into waking and the world turned
Weird.

There were wolves perched on
spears as I held Latin verbs.
A girl had buckshot wounds on her
back like Hawaii splatters across the Pacific

Nashboro

This afternoon I sat in Fort Nashboro
and flayed my mind for wanting more
and for staring down the
mouths
of snakes ringed with statehood
and warning
Thine eyes aren't too far spread for
one
solid
strike

Little City

Little City
what has dropped
tween your seams
and burned spotlights
across jurisdictions
through dork realms
and cool motifs
and overlapping themes
and motifs

On skyscrapers I've seen
three thousand windows
they've spelled your name
and cried for dimes
and held shimmering in the
heaviest of days

the welds fight for support
guilds draw sticks
secret smokes in dark
Throats
black