Poems and Bones
A poem lasts,
bones change into oil,
One is a verbal artifact,
oil comes from dead things,
turns all cars into hearses:
“I see dead people.”
Dinosaur bones went into the ground,
deeply, the pressure turned them into fossil fuel.
Barney is your passenger today and every day.
Poems will last as long as trees grow
Poems on the internet will last as long as there is electricity
It comes from (all at once now) fossil fuel
(Is there a pattern here?)
More like a circle that’s been expanding since the big bang,
What goes around comes around.
Watch careful now, the verbal artifacts are here!
Rabid Dances
Everybody rushes!
Everybody gushes!
Down the stairs, up the stairs,
Various hairs on heads and faces.
Late for class, late for meeting,
Up the stairs, down the stairs.
Wow, is that guy still alive!
Whoa, Joe gained weight!
There’s that dick from O’Hara’s class.
Everybody rushes!
Mass transit of faces,
Dashes, lashes, gnashed teeth,
Growls, frowns, grad school.
Are there any Connections to be made here!
Dickens wanted connections!
E.M. Forster wanted connections!
They’re both dead,
still, no connections.
Huxley said of the lives inside our heads,
“each of us is an impenetrable strong box of solitary confinement.”
But Huxley is dead!
Does anyone really know anyone?
Does anyone care to know anyone for more than just grunt and sweat?
How real are the dead bodies on C.S.I?
How real are the dead bodies on the news?
Is there any difference unless the dead body is someone we really knew?
(This does not mean crying
over Access Hollywood’s account of a celebrity death;
Princess Di Dies and the world stops;
The son of the neighbor we just wave to in passing
Dies in a car crash—no big deal.
Reality TV—
About as real as Candid Camera used to be.
If it was really real, Simon Cowell would be dead already
And the public would cry for him too;
The folks on Survivor would be on murder charges.
Nah, not real—but definitely shallow.
Who swallows this bullshit?
Everybody rushes!
Everybody gushes!
Bikeman: Carolina Flyer
The legs are as pistons,
putting distance on the blacktop at 90 revolutions per minute the muses
implore: Allez! Allez! (Go! Go! )
nature cajoles him to push this two-wheeled chariot.
All the rider knows is daylight past the Marriot
onto black ribbons of road that crisscross
a patchwork of grasses green
trees brown in shades as diverse
as the sights and sounds of rough and sky.
Rabbits bound. Turtles lounge. Horses carouse.
brown cows make chocolate milk.
Eagles soar ‘round Falls Lake.
smaller birds sing the glory of flight,
And I, no less than they,
hurtle along as our twin Rorschach shadows keep us company ‘neath the Sun-God.
Double-wheeled Pegasus, release me from trouble,
set me free as the trees rush backward,
and the Canadian Geese honk approval
at this solo flyer.
To ride all my days on this sleek, steel steed.
Nature’s love and my bike are all I need.
Flashback: Dredging up
Random invasions of mind’s-eye flash cards
Ancient past to fast forward,
Each a stabbing image in a tragicomic montage.
Youthful indiscretions.
Puke-inducing confessions.
A towel-shrouded lamp for “mood” lighting,
Damp summer sweat,
drops collecting in her belly button, dripping from mine.
Heat on heat—
Fuzz to fuzz,
and grunts,
primal smells.
He worried!
She said, “It’s just sex!”
That he couldn’t live without, fooled that it was love.
She loved the friction of rubbing sweat on sweat.
But he was a nouveaux Byron
vexed by contemplation of premature ejaculation.
The pain came and went,
Drowning the ego in a facsimile of raw oysters and a danger sign:
Slippery When Wet.
David Garrett Izzo is an emeritus English Professor who has published 17 books and 60 essays of literary scholarship, as well as three novels, three plays, a short story, and poems. David has published extensively on the Perennial Spiritual Philosophy of Mysticism (Vedanta) as applied to literature. He is inspired by Aldous Huxley, Bruce Springsteen, his wife Carol and their five cats: Huxley, Max, Princess, Phoebe, and Luca. Two of his novels are fantasies with cats as characters: Maximus in Catland and Purring Heights. www.davidgarrettizzo.com
