overhaul rev c - sans title

[concretekiss]

When your swingset galloped away
it left two clefts where tiptoes prodded the earth
into momentum, where goliaths knelt to pray,
their bodies sin scalded

Prideful lies about scaling the swing bar
twice, tangle in the honeysuckle vines
along the hurricane fence
If you close your eyes you can see
tiny & tarnished now, what's left
of your schoolyard, stone state lines
where behind you kissed in earnest
the crook of your arm, the imaginary mouth
of some church boy. Now, peering through
the telescope of a decade

with the shortage of kid skin
& candy wrappers, ant labyrinths wither
skeletal. Their teetering queens shell stories
of long fought wars, kool-aid mustached
villains slapping a massacre of thousands

Marbles sit aristocratic next to pebbles
Tetherball post pines for garden snake embrace
& you turn the memory like a pearl
a jawbreaker, the escape swingset, a serrated
pendulum's dictating tictoc, keeping time

Comments

[cowboyjesus.livejournal.com]

Do they re-run "Voices and Visions" on TV where you live, because this is ready for something like it. I didn't see the full power of poetry until I caught it on PBS in the late Eighties. It probably accounts for more than a few re-connects with books for kids, and adults about lost from the workaday drudgery.

Stuff plays in the background to this poem for me. The reveler is barely hinted at, the present is faintly implied. Make a video of this! Have a trying-to-be-more-straight-laced gal in Physics class closing her eyes (mid-lab struggling with a pendulum and gravity), and hearing the squeaking of the swings, a father taking away the rusty old swingset (galloping away)...and of course, the kissing in earnest/ the crook of your arm
You could show a child looking at an ant farm on a windowsill in fascination, and then two rednecks just beyond trying vainly to kill a mound outside.

Do you have a volume of these about bound up?

[flightviolation.livejournal.com]

i rarely look at the tv anymore, unless i rented a movie. i can barely baaarely remember "voices & visions." aaaah, there is not enough lifetime to do all the things i want.

a couple years ago i made a small chapbook & sold copies online thru paypal. the book has long expired, as i hate everything i've written after about a year, if not less.
maybe i'll make another soon, once my submission rejections all come rolling back in.