GRINGOBOY POETS
Gringoboy poets / cutting loose
with new pinking shears bought in Paris
France
snipping away the wardrobe of unfashionable
imagery
Some put on the professional's frowning
Lenin-mask
and lean forward to scribble historic
directives
Some dress up in helmet and boots /
deconstruction workers
begin tearing down rusty syntactic scaffolding
framed in a Futurist sunrise while
some just flag down parataxis
to carry them out of the smelly knife-lit
barrio
their own rage
Gringoboy poets / cutting loose
from the bloodstained mesh of social
relationships
all the others are flailing and gasping
about in
They can drift down in a diatom shower
among loose particles and speech fragments
slide in on the long combers of
sentence after sentence hushing up the
beach
or back into an old shell in the warm
grant pool
wave their saw-edge critiques at each
other
from a distance
Gringoboy poets / cutting loose
with new scalpels they bought in Paris
France
cutting loose from the persimmon mush
of their bodies
to float in the sunlit brine inside
the eyeball
decoding patterns projected on the clean
white wall
to flatten themselves into pink bookmarks
with legs
so they can crawl between the pages
of the dictionary
and fall asleep
to be pure brains curled in secret laboratory
tanks
like boneless embryos suckling on their
spinal cords
Gringoboy poets / cutting loose
from the apronstrings of that old bag
/ the Signified
Handsome and talented they get Language
to marry them
but when they find out she has her own
oxyacetylene opinions
that she does not come neatly apart
like a toy typewriter
that she sweats and screams and bleeds
Gringoboy poets feel like cutting loose
again
Yes gringoboy poets want a divorce
That's OK / Language wants one too
Adam Cornford
WIND/CHILL FACTOR
So the ears get cold, ridiculously enough,
and hurt like nails driven slowly into
the skull,
and you know that donning a hat
is yet another task to be accomplished,
that life is a secret between a body
and a soul,
a picture puzzle in which you are a
part.
This touching and betrayal--
the everyday ache you try to assuage
with heat, with Mozart,
with projects and works in progress,
those goals and quotas you strive to
meet
in the blessed forgetfulness of work.
Power is what keeps the cold away:
soft flesh, a pleasing smile, magnetism;
or the engine turning wheels
turning sweat into money.
It's a rough, unfinished business,
and each gust hurts fresh before it
numbs.
How long can you keep yourself covered?
When will you turn in?
Barbara Schaffer
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