Sleeping with Degrelle

I bedded on a hard rock, listening to Haydn.
Gassy water churned my frame into pale cuisine
as the Metro stopped in my dream. Even homeless
immigrants, stars, carried on as proper citizens,
comfortable in their arrogant tax-paying.
My storm-tossed pillow time gave up
to the secret police, seeking a collaborator
for inquiry into dark passages they’d been told
of in recent sermons ignored by the networks.
No body rose in the clatter of the abstractions.
Yet I kept running, a store-bought allusive force
disco to disco, smashing open painted windows
to let in fresh diesel exhaust, allowing beer
drenched sweat and mass-marketed smoke respite.
Run-down neighborhood air invaded the dance floor,
staccato electricity circuited into glorious acoustic form,
transforming the half naked into proper believers
clad in white tuxedos and perfectly applied makeup.
Galley slaves swathed in sero-negativity; they wept
with humble Pei, leaping through glass pyramids
onto displays of tourist-friendly masterpieces.
The cold barrel of a very old profession woke me
with a start. My panic left fitfully sleeping puddles
on the boutique of far-right barricades,
where the rest of aberrant had been concentrated,
unable to correspond with the rest of Europe
without handcuffs, plastic gloves, and generic facial masks.
At an insensitive distance, ruined Lutheran temples
and looming Roman Eglise kept egalitarian sympathy
over our huddled bodies until one of us fell,
at first from exhaustion, then from hunger, finally,
from a luridly antiseptic fever, a disease so clinical,
so mathematical - democratic, even - in its efficiency,
in our death throes, we called it civilized.
With perforated arms I pulled a young missionary close,
mud and rain caking his corpse blond features
before using him to shield my unnoticed passing
into the side walks of the unborn.

- Adam Henry Carrière

(added 02.12.10)

Time Stitch

I see, I see, said the blind man to the deaf dog
   to the assembled throng
   of boys that don't belong,
of cabbages and kings
polar bears and whales
places and things
bedtime stories and kinky tales,
   the midnight sun and the Mediterranean dawn
   the full Biscay moon and faces long gone
museums in the morning drizzle
   crashing waves on the shore,
as high as the angels in the Alps
   alone at home, angry and poor;
the night train strangers under the northern lights
ill-dressed tourists and carbonated neon brights
   what a sad sight
   seen by eyes that don't work right
punctured by needles icy cold
to travel a broken cobblestone path, so we're told
   cruising railroad stations for rented meat
   fine dining and morphine cocktails trying to deny defeat
   flying alone in a premier class seat
   mountain air saliva he holds in his lip's heat
great towers bathed in whimsy
   empty Norman beaches to every side
   wandered by husbands desperate for their brides;
      interstates and passports
postcards and souvenirs
   laughter and bliss
   people you can hardly miss
      sights so beautiful you feel felt up by God
and shed an atheist's few tears;
   I've been to heaven, and it's a lot like Paris.

- Adam Henry Carrière

(featured in the poetry forum 02.12.10)

Queer Quadrille

Tell me, how many of them would deliver themselves
up deliberately to perdition (as He Himself says in that
book) rather than go on living secretly debased in their own eyes?
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Aloof, Voltaire would advise looking for someone less
like a character in a book; Goethe agrees, adding,
'A little less re-writable, please, or less so than I.'
Genet shouts, 'I want a boyfriend!'
With an anxious nod, Forester peeks open
his journal, noting “He can look like this:
Bare, often, warm in the dark, soft to the touch."
Myakovsky growls, 'Zapadniks!' and seizes a quill,
scrawling, "Short, sweet-smelling hair, fingers to glide
over the ice of my heart, nipples for my erect tongue to caress."
Isherwood raises a gloved hand. 'What about, "Lips
tight over closed eyes picturing him, an out-of-fashion movie
unnoticed by the Society page." Hm?' Fugard claps politely.
Greene sneers perfidiously. 'Veneration doesn't propel boys
into refuge. The wind does. "Let the West Country breeze
hide with him in my soul." Or something like that.'
Hiding under the buffet, Kundera tosses a note
onto Schiller's lap. The German reads it skeptically:
"A near-perfect banquet that isn't a black grave."
La Rochefoucault pours more wine.
Da Ponte and Schikaneder carouse duetically.
Williams scurries out through the back door.
Mishima takes his bread. Goddard scribbles up the tablecloth:
Captured in silver dust, framed in gold, the boy makes the man one.
Stone drunk, Fitzgerald approves; Gertrude and Zelda demur.
Tchaikovsky begins a seventh symphony on the spot,
but cannot decide what to call it.
Balzac, smelling of cognac, proves no help.
Marlowe begins to bicker with DeVere.
Yevtushenko wins a drinking contest with a bitter Hemingway
and takes the floor. 'A man's love is voluminous!
Glorious! Victorious!' Brodsky cheers ostentatiously.
Seeing Mandelstam hasn't yet arrived, they both weep.

- Adam Henry Carrière

(added 02.12.10)

day sky

I - The child, he's got his own
private tourist,
smelling of pineapple and despair.

Each set of hands
takes a holiday
across the other blue body,

while each set of lips
like Lady Day
fill the red night.

II - That wind sparkle in his eye
has done gone;
there's no need to tell me
we're sound coming back,
earthen.

It's all over now,
you've changed.

- Adam Henry Carrière

(featured in the poetry forum 12.29.09)