Sean Spada
three untitled poems

it aligns itself in eventuality
and goes like it should
but it was the feeling that the
car would not work right
that got me just then --
not even
that i couldn't keep it straight
but that some jerk would crash into me
and then i would be dragged off
where they'd test me anyway it's
over now so
don't worry and
i'd wake up in chains like
a dazed monkey drugged from the
jungle, that look, pouting irritatingly
dumbstruck look, dragged away in a bed
but anyway it's over
now so don't worry anymore

*

you're sent out to the haymarket
you dirty thing,
they don't know how to greet you
save to beat you and
leave you out in the snow

buried in a wet grave
drowned post mortem in
the marsh on your side
like a ballooned horse
in the damp fields with a
touch of soil to cover
you from sight of those
who smell corpses everyday
to earn their bread
and the bed they visit
to exhale their real human urges

not shallow but deep to hide you
from a humanity more interested in
your living kin
your followers on earth who pass
through the beds and the haymarket,
laid into
until their swamped slumber upon you
where you are forgot once you
have decomposed to the dirt you were
covered in,
wasted face and voice underneath

*

on the river shore,
in the thick clogged
crowd of trees and growth,
the building left over
from five thousand years or more.

we stood watching it decompose,
from two different sides we saw
the acidic air turn it to ashes.

its fall. no sounds rose
as it disintegrated, sinking
into the hot ground,
too old not to rot, i suppose.

you might think the same
on the other side of the ruin,
but i can't make out the shape of your face
through the jungle air, the hazy afterbirth
that stings the ancient blocks --
there is a stone death
in the inhuman heat of autumn,
a miscommunication in the jungle of things.

it will sink low into the mud
until we can't show anyone what once stood
stiff and senile to its own death.

no one is left with anything
that won't crumble,
i suppose.

<< Back to Issue 4, 2002