A Woman Dancing Half-dead in Yr Arms
Say that falling out of love under blue superstructures
Is like a woman dancing half-dead in yr arms
& that where she’s gone you can never follow
Say that everything cold & white is yr lover now
& that tomorrow is just another bad elegy to yr lover’s red embryo
Say that there is solid music in these walls
& that pissing yr own name into this wasteland of perfect snow
You snag each breath with absurd eyes daring you—
The black tongue of a lie humping itself into the oblivion
Of yr very next word & that this is the triumph of yr art—
Someone you don’t know lifts a bent fence
In the darkness as you pass & you pass half-noticing
A Room We Think Is Red
A mistake being made enters the poem with the arrogance of purpose & there’s nothing bigger
than musical chairs—the world’s smallest violin being played while it rains!
Who is it? The sky? Yes, momma!
A man is eating Abstract Expressionist soup from a bowl! A bowl with no shape is itself
the shape of the rain’s indomitable kiss!
& so flowers appear in the shadows of our hair
& this pod of faceless ingénues is making sense of squeals in the atrium of a dying skyscraper!
& darkening the ground with blue drops of hallucinated rain—
You used to be you, someone says—all dogs sleeping the sleep of make-believe—& that was
so sexy to me!
This Really Cool Spider Woman Wants Me!
I was just supposed to be her fix
The guy she could call for a hump
On a running washing machine
When things she needed done weren’t getting done
Like I was some kind of energy drink
Or a fucking science experiment in better living
But then she’d start in chatting real casual-like
About how she loved sex with Boo Boo
Her father’s blind German Shepherd
& the washer’s going chunka-chunka-chunka
Like a train pulling into Orgasm Station
& just when I think she’s through yakking
About fucking this stupid blind dog
She slaps me & yells Get off of me, you freak!
Like she just woke up in someone else’s body
& you know what a shock that is
& then, just when I stop, she bites me hard on the chin
& the washer is bucking like a Texas bronco
& what the fuck!…I scream
But it’s just her being the post-coital
Cannibal-spider-bitch that she is
But she’s all over me like anorexia
On her damaged inner child
& so I fix her a plate & then me a plate
& we sit there chewing, both of us silent
& just staring at each other…because…
Well…you know…we’re hypocrites
& picking up this old book she says,
“I stole this from the library at UMASS.
It’s called The Feminine Mystique. & now
I’m afraid to read it, of what it might say.”
& she’s got her nose right up against
The stained yellowed edges of the pages
& she’s riffling them like a Rolodex
& she’s sniffing them—you know—
That musty smell of an old library book—
Like it was some kind of strange
& powerful flower making her dumb
& I start to crack-up, laughing at her
But then I’m just standing there
& I’m mocking her & I’m thinking
Real quick-like, how this only pisses
Me off & I don’t know why
—————————————————————————
Raymond Farr is author of Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012), Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav (Blue & Yellow Dog 2015) & 2 e-chapbooks, Eating the Word NOISE! (White Knuckle Chaps 2015), & A Journey of Haphazard Miles (ALT POETICS 2016). Raymond is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog, now archived at http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com & publisher/editor of a new poetry blog The Helios Mss at theheliosmss.blogspot.com