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LACK OF FINGER PRINTS
Lisa writes him love notes
in her very best penmanship.
He attends her for beer
and games on her widescreen TV.
Her idea of love does not include
religious handcuffs.
His idea of love
boxes all of her sex toys.
Lisa thinks to inflame his heart
through a home cooked meal.
He thinks to bring a bag of ice
to use as a pillow.
He asks if Lisa’s parachute
is a shiny golden hue.
She owns no nylon, no silk,
only an old pair of high-jump shoes.
His vague love of unconnected half circles
sips from the cup of martyrs.
Lisa suffers the wrench
of a rusted bolt snapped in two.
- Kenneth P. Gurney
(added 07.01.10)
FOR EVERY ATOM BELONGING
Delphi mends geographies,
polities, a loss of love
with poetry that penetrates
the deaf ear, that infuses
images the blind clearly
discern.
She extracts Lot’s wife
from the pillar
long since eroded
and taken to the sea,
reconstitutes her body
and spirit: grain by grain.
Delphi records her name
in a new scripture
that lists the recovered,
the closed defile,
the new land covenant
of drinking water.
She proceeds
of her own accord,
recites an essential song
derived from the core
of the youthful sun
and its nightly reflection
upon the moon.
- Kenneth P. Gurney
(added 07.01.10)
AT THE END
I taste the summer salt
on your lips.
You reflect heat for thermals
so your hawk soars higher.
I hold you
tighter than pain.
Your passion
ignites the setting sky.
I glide on the dream
of your billowing wind.
You strike, rip me apart,
eat my raw emotions.
Consumed, I lie
in an acoustic shadow.
Sated, you curl
into the folds of time.
- Kenneth P. Gurney
(featured in the poetry forum 07.01.10)
BENEATH THE COTTONWOOD AT THE RIVERSIDE
Delphi asks me
about my time before I was born
and after I die.
What strange memories
my grey-matter-ghost refrains.
Delphi asks me
if a butterfly’s wing flap
over the Sahara
spawns hurricanes
in the Caribbean,
what weather is produced
by our politicians’
windy speeches.
What peculiar powers
my words expose through poems.
Delphi tells me
the only laws she obeys
are the laws of physics,
but sometimes
she ignores those, too.
No water droplets
fail to support our bodyweight
as we recross the Acheron.
- Kenneth P. Gurney
(added 03.04.10)
SANCTUARY
Dianne makes me stare
at the arch of a church window:
stained glass, leaded glass,
the stories of saints and sinners.
Distracted, I see dust-bunnies
scurry across the floorboards
as the sanctuary door opens
and a stranger’s hand crosses
herself, before taking a knee
at the second pew to invest prayers.
But it is not for the wooden god,
cross-depicted, or the glazed stories
that we are here—the light, darling,
the light—as bright sun dims
into twilight and darkens
into a night that ushers
the spotlights into their business,
as sensors invisibly flick a switch
and the white walls and ceiling
erupt with color.
- Kenneth P. Gurney
(featured in the poetry forum 03.04.10)
HIGHLIFE
The dogs tussle over a rope-toy,
the wind rustles the cottonwood branches,
lying on her back in the diamond hammock,
Delphi plays cats-cradle
and I, my back against the embracing tree trunk,
set my book down in the grass, so I may
watch the clouds compare beer bellies
protruding over their blue jean sky.
- Kenneth P. Gurney
(added 03.04.10)
SPELUNKING
Her heart is quick
with the black void
that resides between stars.
Even though her beauty blinds you,
your love cannot save her
from the emptiness
and the galaxy sized journey
that, at the speed of light,
takes a million years.
Her silence is absolute
in the vacuum of space
and on the barstool next to yours.
She watches the bar-tide mirror
for empty stares, but the other patrons
see only the bottom of their beers.
She closes her ears to the restless din inside
and focuses on the unspoken desire
of the public room’s unaware sybils.
An hour before the bar-time Lotharios
hit the red shift, the blue shift
she removes herself from their gravity,
from this lit space where everyone sees
only the shell, but not the ghost inside
or the depths of heaven.
On her way out, she leans into you,
whispers in your ear, Close your eyes
to see the way out from this midnight cave.
- Kenneth P. Gurney
(featured in the poetry forum 11.25.09)
WITCHING HOUR ADJUSTS TO DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME
She arrived all at once to the spot
where she stood for an hour
before anyone noticed her being there
among the peonies.
Someone remarked, with a musical reference, how
Lucy in the sky with Diamonds her night dark dress
appeared under the unnatural black light, until
someone else commented about the absence of stars above.
Her memory spilled over into the punch bowl
and before long everyone who imbibed
knew what it was like for her to suckle
from her mother’s milky breast as a child.
Someone slept, for an hour, in her iris colored iris
and won the hide and seek game
as the wind laughed right out loud
at the notion of ten-thirty in the evening.
She entered into a communal pair of blue jeans
while walking the glass streets of a west coast town,
while the beach cat scratched the works of Shakespeare
out of its ears and kicked all the letters deep into the sand.
Someone, in the guise of a curtain rod, held up
the party’s exquisite corpse and declared it a dandelion
shower head, so the tired could bathe and
ready themselves for bed.
- Kenneth P. Gurney
(added 11.25.09)
IT TAKES 2000 YEARS FOR A WAVE TO SWAGGER AROUND THE WORLD *
The ocean came ashore and walked into
a twenty-four hour convenience store,
pocketed a set of double-A batteries
and a pack of watermelon bubblegum.
A boy, sitting on the parking blocks,
noticed the ocean exiting the store,
recognized it and thanked it for being
the cradle of evolution that, eventually, lead to him.
The ocean foamed a little in satisfaction
and changed its color to a brighter blue,
but couldn’t shake loose these three plastic containers
in its left thigh that some ship dumped off the coast
along with a host of other garbage items
that dissolve into toxic polycarbonates—that over time
drift on the currents to a spot in the pacific
north of Hawaii where the ocean grew up.
On its way back down to the shore
the ocean kicks sand in the faces of other sand pebbles,
writes a poem with its finger, becomes slimmer as
the sun reaches down to take the ocean’s spare tire,
and one stick of watermelon gum, heavenward
to form a cloud and to start assembling
the colors of a rainbow.
* note: title is a line from a Maureen Seaton Poem
- Kenneth P. Gurney
(added 11.25.09)
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