Richard Louis Ray: City Poem, December 15th, 2013

City Poem, December 15^th, 2013

I

The city stomps and it chomps

and it asks you:

what do you want to eat,

what does it take to eat you,

what do you make

of the taste

of eating and being eaten?

After all this eating

and shitting

and watching where you step

and waking up God knows where,

what are you, what feel you,

whose load can you

lighten today?

Along the rooftops

and entryways

the aging latticework

and cornices

sag through the cobwebs

of my awareness

and I feel their weight

as though the lives

of the masons

and ironworkers

were falling down

through my shoulders,

pinning my feet

to the earth

where they turn

and lift my gaze up, up—

see what we left

for your enjoyment!

II

My awareness

where the sense

of ownership

passes

from

hand to hand

then

it dissolves

as it should

but

be wary of shoulds

they come

from

the heart

for

the throat.

Richard Louis Ray: A Place for Dreamers

A Place for Dreamers

Houses lose their dreamers. A man and a woman

move into a dream and change the wallpaper,

sand the floors, stain it with their sex and sweat.

They leave the picture of the nun on the wall, paper

around it, ponder her name as they learn the house's

creaks and groans, the sag in the roof from the tree

that stumps the yard. The slump in the corner where

the sinkhole began to nibble. He drives a Cadillac,

had it restored, the year of his birth, sings the song

"if it's the last thing I do," knows to tread gently

when his wife says stop, on the road or in bed.

Come Sunday mornings, or when the walls begin

to shadow the soul, they head for the hills, wander

amongst redwoods without speaking for hours.

The windchimes, when they get home, murmur

like the ghosts of nymphs wishing them luck

in the dream they weave, luck in the dream

that weaves them.

--Richard Louis Ray

in response to the following prompt:

We buy ugly houses. A nun in a rusty
Cadillac blows past a stop sign. Sunday

morning in the Richmond. My window
is a watercolor, the ringing of blue bells.*

"A Place for Dreamers" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Feel free to sample, remix, or respond to this poem, or the original prompt, and submit to glenncbach (at) gmail (dot) com to be considered for inclusion in the May 2014 edition of Truck.

*Prompt includes texts sampled from Glenn Bach, Helen Frosi, John Kannenberg, and Marc Weidenbaum.