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