“This poem’s about…” by Alexander Best
Posted: May 26, 2011 Filed under: Alexander Best, English Comments Off on “This poem’s about…” by Alexander Best“This poem’s about”
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This poem’s about what’s inbetween, this part’s
the piece got left out.
Crawled up to the roof where calmness is. A
guy’s up there, kind and cool, big and
warm and vague — didn’t beat me.
In my room: dumptrucks heave along, dragging
dreams through potholes. Oil-burning “steam shovels”
unearth me at devilish dawn, pound the 8 X 12-foot ground,
pluck me from the floorboards, with crooked steel teeth
— and fling.
This dream lives life in secret;
rectangled in a cupboard; a thing pretzel-bawdy,
its mouth at its crotch and a scald-pipe
collars the throat.
This poem’s about what’s inbetween, the
bit unmentioned, put neat-to-the-side.
On the table: an eavestrough-vase holds sculpture of
tough-skin-slicing weeds — rumex crispus L. — grew in a
dry oasis ‘neath the expressway. These weeds
proclaim the Dot. And a bricked-in, coal-chunk’d,
wall-eyed cot railroads fright from me, in a
room’s as trusted, big-busted, nut-clamped and
breakneck’d as within’s the rattled world without.
This poem can’t take the hint. Ignored, dropped,
still it’s self-propelled on a head of fumes.
At last, this poem describes the face in shadow,
turned toward an ancient painted place,
filthy t-shirt stretched ‘cross
cave-bound eyes like tissue of silk.
This poem’s what’s behind the shrapnel mask,
it records the dear loss of the fake.
This poem, it gladly ends.
(2004)
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Zócalo Poets 