Truck

Raymond Farr

warholaray1@embarqmail.com

Broken Word

Quiet

As a heart

Beating

A child’s blood

Thru skinless lips

I squeezed

My little wolf self

Thru this hole in the fence

I used to know was there

The Chinese character

For broken word

Is a ballet

Of broken fences

Broken lines

A psychedelic boy

On the verge

I had no answer

But the shell

In which I had

Grown

Dark

& resolute

The One Continuous Motion We Seem

& regarding the bald man

& his leash laws…

We rely on the zodiac!

The black house he walks out of

Is a fiction we perpetuate

We peel it quietly

From the edges of his dreams

Another man is putting feet on the rain

& the whole street is a front yard

Smothered in crabgrass

& what about those oars

Out splashing on the grey Charles—

The water like a sleeping friend

Poked awake by the rain—

Are we just the one continuous

Motion we seem?

The Green Fires of Rapture

Diamond birds fly broken lines

Off intimate shoals

& a sparkling language is handed down

A man is wrapped in assumptions we make

Of a man wrapped in a hotel towel

& clutching the green fire of his wet lover

With both scorched hands bandaged surreally

This is the mystery—the eye is a rotted deck chair!

A beautiful horse we pull from the unconscious wreckage!

& all our good reasons for reading Tom Orange

Are just the razed sun & moon of the facts—

Information up & down our central nervous system

& so shove us back down the broken ladder

There’s only more mystery there!

An inconsolable procedure

Impedes the flow of our days

Masculine Redefinition of the Obvious

& I am the same man

The same ridiculous rearrangement of a series of Country Joe & the Fish particulars—

The hiss of the same black ocean like a vibrating chair—

Mother & Father Cauliflower are 2 metaphors for the same identical unsuitable life 

There is sawdust sprinkled like blood on the snow

& I can never lick our fingers clean enough

We sleep on a porch overlooking a tiered hillside 

It May Have Been Snowing

I want to make clear

Something out of the ordinary—

Asylum here is glass!

& not the pure bronze idiosyncrasies

Of mother at the dog races—

It’s how I mourn the sublime

Error that had taken you from me

It may have been snowing

My own head may have been talking

I felt the shimmer of nerve gas—

Euthanized cats bloated   

In a field far off & gutted by sunset

I felt I was in a hurry to leave

To be anywhere but where I had ended up

& so I waited for dusk

A river of smoke floated crows in my eyes

Where are you Tom Eliot?

My life expectancy

Is 12:43 p. m. today 

& there are too many sick birds

Clawing at the grey air

Above the Baseline Landfill