It all begins when she offers her soul to the highest bidder.
Well, young girls really, none any older than 19. Blush of
skin. Scent of sandalwood. Full lips on the mouth of the earth.
Or maybe it could turn out to be fresh flowers sent to a hotel
room. A subway token that escapes into the nearby gutter.
"From this angle I have a better view of giddy & uproarious",
she says, after the first stiff of zero-sum imagining. "Yeah,
and the bird flu in no two snow flakes are suppose to be
alike, but tell me who'd take the time to check", I reply, with
my umpteenth personal story waiting to be denounced...
feathers crowded with crows...
corn dense enough to broom stick.
A tangle of children's bicycles.
A stack of baseball trading cards.
A book of pages dipped in the idealism of ash.
Tracing the raw finger of a violet scar. Really?
Is that the surprise ending? Funny, I thought even
if the story runs out of dialog the sky would eventually
darken and night become just another bedside table.
Just remember,
no one ever considered the power of change
to be great enough to become twin towers with a preference
for redheads. Or that the story would be so predictable
it would float. Or that the by-line of diplomacy would speak with a lisp.
That the forecast of bad memories would be dressed to kill
or even held tight against a forever to come. Spilling out like a liquid
necklace with the jewels ordinary cut glass.
Or perhaps just the romantic passage of an assassin's bullet
in the middle of a Caribbean cruise.
Tangerine toast. Tar graves. Galoshes that have never
felt water. Either way,
we'll hold this fat ledger of the future
up high enough in the air that the world
can see its faults, or at least until the freight train passes
or the shaman can return
with a fistful of the scared calf's heart.
Or next time try an Italian hillside town layed-back in the Sunday morning of an earthquake ripple that has its faults or an ordinary constellation of spinal tap exhibition presently living under federal protection with a set of exquisite legs but too much sash
idolized in a Raphael painting about cocktail leather holster or maybe even pleasing but my thoughts still sometimes wander to the anthropoid
in rare Baroque poise braced in the jagged mirror of reflection
allowing just enough time to see the mutate with albino eyes turn out to be the flashing lights of a guardrail at a train-crossing that would offer a much better cheap thrill actually and all you have to do is rub it first.
Maurice Oliver spent almost a decade working as a freelance photographer in Europe. Then, in 1995, he made a lifelong dream reality by traveling around the world for eight months, recording his experiences in a journal instead of pictures. And so began his desire to be a poet. His poetry has appeared in The Potomac Journal, Circle Magazine, Bullfight Review, Tryst3 Journal, The MAG, Eye-Shot, The Surface, Wicked Alice, WordRiot, Taj Mahal Review(India), Stride Magazine(UK), Retort Magazine(Australia), & online at subtletea.com, undergroundvoices.com, friggmagazine.com, tmpoetry.com, zafusy.com, girlswithinsurance.com, & interpoetry.com (UK). He lives in Portland, Oregon where he is a tutor.