Printer's Devil

 

A printer's devil told me

(gesturing with his blackened fingers)

that the sound of your voice had been published

by moonlight on a dead crow's face.

Little starfish, I said, touching his beardless cheek,

return now to your watery home, that shell

full of mermaid-song out by the reef.

Poor Inky, no jagged cure can ever get him clean.

I returned to my clay and kiln, thinking that I might bake

some sort of Vodou plaything to give your tongue a palsy.

The waves down by the dunes offered their salt

and told me that the whole sea could be my circle. 

Of course you spoke anyway, like glue-sap in a broken bucket

from a storm-split tree tapped with a sharpened crucifix..

I'm leaving this damp-match town bursting with illiterate poets,

your half-dead friends, parroting smoke from the foundry of your good intentions.

_________

for Word Garden Word List--B Is For Bad Poetry. 

Come On

Come on.
that's what my friends say.
They say,
girl,
go conquer Egypt, or something.
Get a ring on every finger.
Did you know,
those are not Nile crocodiles
doing the old snap and roll
in the shallows?
Those are my old loves.
Talk to them.
See what I'm about, on my good days.

I still have them, sometimes
(good days, I mean)
but the nights have gone molasses black for me,
though not half as sweet.
If you could love me,
then why won't you love me
like you did
the first time?
Come on, baby,
I need so little, and you possess so much--
every toss of your hair moves the planets.

Come on.
that's what my friends say.
They say,
do that strut, like you used to do.
But that was before I went so girl-weak and needy.
That was before I knew how you could please me.
Before the fall.
Before I met you.
_______


 

Questions Under An Oklahoma Sky

What happens when even the ghosts can't go back,

when the poison is so deep in the land that

even the memories go blind?

What happens when the streets are empty

the windows empty

the feeling empty

when you can't go back

and neither can the heartbeat that's gone from this place

never to come back

not for a thousand years?

__________