Four Poems
Trinary number
Three’s a throng
Trinity days
The hidden sinister
Inherent in the shotgun
Of thirteens
Chords of a cursed heart
Strings of a broken ghost
Tremont Three hills
Where the sun nestles
Down in the green of
Their eyes
Numbered daze
With the one and the three
Two begot
The third
One is left swirling
The first third,
The third mind
Assign the soul secret meaning
A badge with a number
On the golden uniform of light
A day that means as much in reverse
As it does going forward
White pope dope smoke day
Latin smoke white dope day
The symmetry of time
Trapped in a million mirrored moon.
Language ghosts spiral
In cool tornadoes
Of swirling speech
I wish I had some to give you
But I am fresh out
I wish I had sleep to give you
I am fresh out of my mind
Empty veils make dreamy curtains
Sunlight buckshot rays blast
Out of the clouds
Lost signs of ghost children
Wrestling the breeze
Some details are worth dismembering
Etched in sand in the battered wind
A grammatical acrobat I’m not
A tenuous tight rope walker in my eternal fall
Dancing on the rumbling air
Of delirious furious thunder
Salient salesman hurdling numbers
Buttered bathers glistening in the stoplight
Dead soldiers unbottling ferocious wishes
That’s a given
for CA
after Houghton Library Reading, 2.12.13
In memory of my failings
You sit like a bruised Buddha
In the company of strange strings
Plucked on an invisible violin
In the crimson silence
True quiet is cut from
The crazy cloth of eternal listening
You emerald crystal ball
Telling the future to fuck off
We have what we need
In these immediate mediations
Sharing dazzling chocolate
In the green room coated with the
Crushed flowers of verdant hills
There’s nothing but forbidden flowers
Nothing between us but
The silence of brotherly love
Broken into holy pieces
Of Acapulco chocolate
Nothing but foggy flowers
Withered in the words
Not spoken between us
What to make of this curious
Green cult in the crimson compound
A wholesale soldier in the service
Of your disarming charm and enthusiastic kindness
Now you run with
The cherished in another meadow
Flying in a feathery missing man formation
Affirmation of the firm grip of gravity
Green demon dragon
Breathing the fires of poetry
Under Dickinson’s desk
And Emerson’s nose
Burning a path
No one dare follow
Beyond burning bridges
The black sun burns the sky
Man, there’s nothin’
But slumbering embers floating in dreams
The heavenly throng climb that bridge
Before beholding its random majesty.
Ashes, ashes,
We all forge
Ahead.
for Willie Alexander
on his 70th birthday
Mad dash music in your magic eye
As you look beyond the blue muted melody
Towards the crazy architecture
Of the Oddfellows Hall
Built in the burgeoning era
Of the Beverly shoe
You have an eye for such things
And an exquisite ear for the gathering gulls
Pin-wheeling beyond in ocean time.
WA-
WA-WA
Wild Anchor washed ashore
Weathered army wayward anvil
Wishful acrobat wrecked abandon
Weirdness abounds…
From the left hand of God
Fire on every fingertip
All lit up
The holy litter
The golden literature
Pure glow after the snow
Fellow son of the city
Of brotherly love
Points the finger of God
Tickling the keys
To heaven’s trap door
Kerouac
Packed a whiskey wallop
Kerouac
wacked out the holy words
Alexander the Great
You conduct the magic keyholes
All jazzed up
Tall like the soul shining
Under the breaking waves on Niles beach
Gloucester harbor ghostly halo going home
All lit up
Out of a cavalier sense of duty
Make some roughed up beauty
Drown in the gorgeous
Sands of sound
Boogie and woogie
Keep you fit in fine fettle
Under the silver
Tingle-tangle of the stars
All lit up for you
On this
such a joyous day.
JIM DUNN's most recent book of poetry is Soft Launch (Bootstrap). He currently resides in Beverly, Mass.