Thursday, July 10, 2008

Live Laugh Love

Often the light plays tricks on your mind
especially when it’s gone.
Images form and rage,
your mind delighting in its revenge
for all the time you denied it today
left behind, like a pet, for more important things.
Even your ears join in the fight against you
tossing imaginary echoes off the wall
sounding the way mischievous elves would sound
if only they were there to help you.
But that’s the way it works,
gray matter against flesh
or the other way around.
Looking above fabric walls sporting thumbtacks,
outside windows pocked by dried dew
it’s obvious who started this fight,
Hatfields and McCoys
except less about pigs
but still about bringing home the bacon.
Fluorescence, neutral hues, keyboards that sound like dogs scratching.
Alone at night, when the sheets are relaxing
around you
and the silence consumes you
while memory plays a record that skips to the best part
an olive branch from an old friend
you smile
and know everything will be all right

--

Hey hey, it's Paul again! In the continuing saga of Tod's laptop of doom I am yet again pilfering my own treasure trove until I get some submissions from fellow 'machiners (and, as you may note, I'm down to the sand at the bottom of the trove). This one came from a surprising Vending Machine groupie. Surprising since she kind of appeared out of nowhere and that all the males in the booth fell in love (she was oh so generous with the beers). This poem represents one of the difficulties of custom-made art: when someone gives you the title "Live Laugh Love" and the words delight, mischievous, and consume, and you happen to be a cynical bastard of a poet, how exactly do you enter into their head and give them what they want? By being a better poet than me, it seems, since she came back and requested haikus from Tod and Butch using the same title.

1 comment:

Speakeasy, that's who. said...

See, but I like this one. "Outside windows pocked by dried dew" ... It's kind of all over the place at the end, which is only notable because it's not all over the place all the time. Like mine. The time crunch is distracting enough without adding pretty girls in there.