stevenallenmay

Otherwise brilliant Yellowstone

Disguise of tender longing , broken
arrow through your promised life;
read the fortune in the spam e-mail
received beneath the firewall portal
Melville genius lately arrived, harpoon
in his travel bag. “There’s a refund for
the old glass”, groans the dying whale.

Teen poets circle notebook paper confessionals
with their angst and good cheer
by-products of the age their slither through
mercy not among the treats left in plastic
Halloween mask. Between us, the rotten scraps
are most divine when served with arsenic

The desert is missing its ocean, the trees are without
blue skies. I remember when jogging -
well that’s another flash of nothing
left partly consumed by time. The rafts took to
the rapids like junkies to morphine, the rush
same for all wanton adventures where the
chance of dying is strongest and the only
twitch of nerve was discarded back at the
trading post, exchanged for bobbles of comfort
we sucked through our eye holes for
luck. There once was a posse who rode
the iron tube through underground anywhere, hip
in their cool wordplay and solemn faces;
all dead now – as the dodo, clacking splintered bone
against steel rail to the abyss. Where
even the boatsmen know the words to “Louie Louie.”

* * *

screenpoem1

separate but unequal thought as dream reality merge on mountain road with empty “bye-bye” on one side and stone-faced cliff on other. 1970’s mellow tune on radio floats out the slightly cracked passenger window. Driver, female, humming along while studying GPS instead of the road ahead – yes, they are still different things – the electronic highway does not melt into death once car plunges off the blinking path. Reality in mid-air scream awakes the deepest sleeper to no avail. The end is a record that skips, that repeats the same note – the same word – the same – the same – the same.

* * *

stevenallenmay is a poet, performance artist, events coordinator, blogger and stay-at-home Dad. He was the primary creator of the poetry festival, Bard Fest, in Berks County, PA and founder of Berks Bards, a 501 c 3 poetry nonprofit in 1998. He curated and hosted several poetry series in Pennsylvania and Northern Virginia. s – a – m also co-founded Plan B Press.

s – a – m is the author of Plastic Sunrise (2003) , frac tur ede volpe ment (2007) , and the assembler of Spontaneous Chili (2001) and has been published in various print and electronic medium. He earned a MAM degree from George Mason University in 2006. He is working on a handful of collections and a novel at the present time.