We had been dealing with it
through the horizon, then the croaking
feeling of nothing below the water
interrupting us.
I love your work, B, have all your books
and you ain’t gonna get ‘em back
unless you tell me, truthfully,
next door through the spaces between the years
beside the black juniper tree
a great fox is playing have no fear
on a drop top piano. Something
to that effect.
.
Explication A
He had used up all his periods,
the manuscript began to budge backward,
to bulge outward like the earth,
if the moon is our replacement
or worse: a marker for all the
creatures of the future. So, get yer—
.
Explication: for B
He was just heart and home, just sick.
All the voodoo language and old
customs of odd waters were tolling.
Sure, and it was romantic to hear the language
at the next table float off like an albatross,
to hover inside of him, and with what meaning.
The difficulty now is just the romance
can’t decide if this word on the menu
means tomato or pain of trees.
—is when the littlest one asks where is the mother?
and moon I say and the other small one pointing out that’s
the moon bouncing along the ridge as I drive the valley west.
Could it help if I yelp help! inside my head?
Could you please divide us in some better way? Optic
copters, pronouncing my dunce, say: good enough pitter-patter
to be here with the ludic basic music or the best
nothing better for miles and a podium moon resembling me
but if I leave the car like I’m on a time out, I’d return suddenly
with that same desire which is mostly a desire to kill myself
maybe just to see who I might meet: Baby Abe, buckets
of stones with wings, several spirits embracing in stasis.
Ah, they’d say, but I know they used to say O! then
they’d write something love something sea something
terrifyingly grand. And when I try: something in your teeth,
which is a start, but I’m betting the bitter-bitty
mad marauder inside that tulip bulb might be better
given all this giving away the best spots for blowing up.
Would my odds increase if I went Greek with this? Poli-sci-fi?
Does it help to remove my erotic middle like that?
Little void, eat up: me guvvy, me groove, me moon
mailbox in the heart. For safe keeping, I’m keeping my head
open, thinking one is fine, but the whole lot is the best
deal me out, Amelia. Out. Stop. Over and Ouch.
Maybe if this desire would stop communicating with stones.
Maybe if the ocean in my dreams would stop rushing, and foaming
and falling back on itself
like a rabid
dog on
a chain.
Another place at a similar time
See the moon
Trace your face
Fat brother of mine
On the frozen edges an incorrectly
Spelled last named apparition stuttered
Because it’ll burn your lips
When they cut your damn head off
But I said it then mostly to
Calm the wretched winter
And those that were so soon
To become dead leaf
Eventual as it all I became
Close enough to hit them with
Those break stones half dozen
In my parka pocket
If you need an outline to begin your report
I shattered the male swan’s thin skull
With a stone, precisely sometime grey and orange
Before sunset
In a blast of broken beat he flapped his starboard wing
In an icy omen
Wretched snare drum— I remembered nature videos
Blood pooled magenta on the frozen lake
The long hooking neck stretched itself down
Later after beef jerky and blue jay rum
The dead swan’s lover still circled him
As if the blood could be just brain tears from some pre-migratory slumber
She didn’t leave his hard white and blooded side
For one minute in two weeks
Then one morning, can’t remember the color
David Krump's poetry appears in periodicals online and in print. Among them: Astropoetica, Blue Fifth Review, Colorado Review, Cricket Online Review, and Touchstone. He has received awards for writing: a winter writer's residency at Caldera, and The Florence Khan Memorial Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies for his manuscript Night is a Good Child. It'll be published in June, and all proceeds will benefit starving children in his belly. If you e-mail him, he'll send it to you for free. After losing the race for the Papacy 2005, his dreams are found on Ebay.
Comments (closed)
johnny Krump
2008-07-23 11:30:53
You should publish David Krumps Poems. Inasmuch as I love you're other poets...mr. krump is a doctor of the obtuse, and has fallen place to the dressing of my broken soul. His poems are genius...profound...and perfectly placed words of wisdom. One could grow in favor with god and man...simply by reading the many woes of David Krump. It makes me wonder late at night, as I cry in the shower with his new book "oranges and sardines," "my god. where does he come up with this stuff?" Then I drift off quietly to slumber between the sheets of bereft genius and missplaced dots...asking why...oh why...cannot you people the world...with poems.
By David