The John Cotter/Shafer Hall Poetry Making Machine

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

II

Your impropriety lecture
is not washing off me
and the fat that is upon me.

I love obesity
in oysters and snifters
and in the women of humanity.

So draw a little picture
of what you've become:
the drunk in the rectory.

Your next one's with me,
so I'll bid thee be dumb,
as in: don't mention it.

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Sestina II

Hot for your mouth, I'll settle on those honey pills
Chinese people insist cure goddamn cancer
you knock them down, kiss, with your eyes rolled
back so you can see the bottom of your brain
and we trepan ourselves in your sweet solution.
But there ain't any salve exists that will cure

my empty tick. I jog bright days with The Cure's
questions populating my head like pillbugs
zooming blossoms, this sticky sun's solution
clocked spreading around at the speed of cancer
and keeping the blue sky blank as my brain
is, now that the day's started and I am rolling.

The Anxious Vehicle, I huff and roll
over in my sleep. I am dreaming up a cure
for the buzz and bang in my hungry brain
while my last head falls asleep on its pillow
my new one huffs colder air, cancerous
as a grudge or a rumor. My solution

is to abandon all hope of a solution:
when I roll on out of this life, I will roll
out of dug's blues and kit's cancer
instead of crossing my fingers for cures
and rifling through your nightstand for these pills
I will do it the old fashioned way: my brain

policing the red-light shows of my brain
in its weak hemo/H2O solution;
its jots of good song like blue pills
keep me rollin', rollin', rollin', roll
what I know keeps me sane to a cure
for all this brightly-colored cancer.

I'll lay you down for that eager cancer
I am "dying" to share with someone else's brain.
You were never a good care or a cure
or a tidy knot (metaphorically.) A solution
rumbles up to my back and grows tremendous as it rolls
illegally as an alien, illegal as the good pills.

So keep a hot mind aimed at a cancer solution.
Like Cancer, you're rolled in my brain with those pills.
Sometimes The Cure is worse than the cure.

Friday, January 06, 2006

I

I brought your olives and cheese but forgot your marijuana.
I'm sorry I called the Steely Dan on your turntable "Weird."
I stole your rolled golds and your calvados.
I trundled everything under your stoop for later.

You only told me why you called when I was leaving.
But these Thanksgiving cheese balls won't roll THEMSELVES in nuts!
Plus your "friend," if he started at noon, must be tight as my belt.
I wish he had a belt too; everyone can see his ass.

Waking him up would only sour matters.
But the hours are pattering away quickly now.
I'm the last one here with complete sentences.
I'm the only one left who still talks to his brain.