Ghost Love Child
Through the warm and glowing tubes
Where? Back here, recessed.
We’re in the head. In back.
Better. I feel it there
unsorted and starting
next to nothing, those boulders
that will never move again:
regret, limit, hazard
of body where my river flows,
overwhelms the immovable.
That’s despair right there.
I rise to the ghost love child.
Despite having means
we’re alone on the road.
They want neither of us.
I slept through the clutter,
the drama, the toothless residue
on memory, back in the back
trying to adjust to a single
frequency that escapes me
like the road home.
Blithe Times
Monday’s stats are forgotten even
as remembered and ingested on Tuesday.
If you remembered me, how many frames
on your shelves and walls would tell
our story? What if they were all recovered?
I lift lint with tweezers from velour
and wish my experience brought comfort.
Nothing soft here. Blood cascading
over dissolving boulders. When super alert,
we don’t fit, maybe as clouds, sky,
and in blithe times hard to remember
without which, memory is for forgetting.
Between Mid-Centuries
It’s all I have, the blues. Inside these lace curtains
in the slow relativity of grandfather time,
or is it time fast? I purge slim limbs of troubled blood
out-pacing sons. Piles of poet’s meat everywhere,
sympathy for all and none. I feel the weight
of their wires, tangled into headdresses
and restraints. So are mine. But they are mine.
I’ve switched the heat on in the house and admire
the gentle tick-free room because the electrons
here on the displays now follow me with advice.
Sorry, but I wasn’t prepared for these fattening comforts
in my current turmoil. I haven’t digested the Mid-century
and here we all are, already in another era of slow progress.
How far is Mid-century? I mean the next one.
I can almost reach it, but time will just flip over
all of our assumptions, repeatedly. Worth the wait?
I grip wood from a quantum of memory and lie flat.
I’m quiet as I breathe from today and bleed
from the past, quiet as the quiet future ahead.
Music plays but annoys. I learned something today
from someone I underestimated. I lie here cautiously.
Like no one else has ever said it. I’m wax.
Subscribers can read all our publications by logging in. |
___________________________________
Lawrence Bridges’ poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016). You can find him on IG: @larrybridges