three poems

Fred Spoliar

sun outguns moon

and the drain covers’

asphyxiated faces like these knots

through these bodies I went

abandoned

playing dead with their eyes

or maybe they were all sleek, glossy and impervious babes

it’s the effect of negligence

of the kissable slime

babes, war

war, babes, capitalism

endless finite combinations

mmm equivocating heavenly bodies

inspires all the worst ideas

like creating an organ

that shoots painful rays into babes

turning actual dreams into problem doors

the same effect that turns me

(there can’t be a single object

which I don’t crave)

That was a lifetime, when I saw the new Ford Explorer

and a space launch and cried because “nature

was being ruined" – as if by construction

and suburban sprawl, a sense of earth was lost,

a mode of travel with a patina that actually felt right

and smelled good,

like love’s dope eating away at the bones of the hills

soft egg noodles of It

was my car, my toy, my friend.

All that hate against all that growth All that development left

the impression that vegetation was to be afraid of

probably With propane torches Imagine

the field before ASOS

and translate a house there.

The year is two thousand and

a trap She felt at home

with phatic hate

In a bad way

If A steps from hated

hated body into slender

void of other qualities That's where I'd live.

In that room it’s never dark there

I never dream about the internet at All

the usherettes looked nervous and violated.

In that waiting bedroom

In that omphalic vanity

mirror A faith

a vague winning, a wave of pasture

pales into rock that makes of pasture kindling.

All the patrons

Smoking

the world holds up a spectre. You feel what beats in the

battery load towards

peony and red crackling stars

How simple my love was

to do what my device needs,

to call dream dead and life irrupting,

this was my passion The object of

prime numbers — the whole existence of the leaves.

Doubled up in the changing room

I began to love

tarmac and red barns, the ridges

of unvisited valleys of salmon

gravely swimming in farms and I kissed

tarpaulins and small plastic casings

the trees on their ridges

I am always kissing

the fat part of my love’s

waste management problem

and my love’s dark side

unrequited knotweed

the blackwater under algic blooms

I kiss the flies all sleek glossy and

impervious

clammy nude babies

crying I kiss

glaucous eyes that look out at nowhere

turning

I began to kiss the drains with my red ankles

I began to love the thin shooting pains

in the swimming pool of an object’s flesh

I was loving the pissing of truck men in pit stops

and in transit, in bottles

in the overmilky lips of jellyfish I had lithe séances

I began to love behind-closed-door problems

vast and unobserved as supernovas

the annals of hurt

and my way of it was

my summer glory in the needling snow

I was so easily All I want

to be understood otherwise

least difficult of

raspberry-blue flesh tones