POEMS TWO

THREE: BROKEN RIVERS Though this was the end end of town

Neither compass point, not even dead.

There a woman urinates against a wall.


I walked on glancing left, straight ahead, then back

Heard a salty sea descend on a dry well.

Yes the Apache would be grateful.


Their Commanche brethren, even the Mixtecs

Grateful. Yeah and they, not they

Even Latter Day Saints mulching on the grassy plain


Yeah grateful and they. I walked on and wondered:

I’d seen many, many things, dead men, living men

But never this and they, never this, never this.



For through the night the shiny serpent

Flies through fetid forests and on.

But never this, no never this.



ONE: THE RED LINE



Troops! Down to the sweety shop

For all my junk and cares like bears

Hang from their branches and in the night

She slept with me, her lemon skin

Smells like smells until we found a lemontree

Its branches and its twigs stuffed neatly.

If only now she would beam

As in a surrealistic dream

Like a Daliesque lobster bowl formed

Its eyes glinting beneath the sheets

In some utilitarian shape, for something useful

Not I, pouring out a lactative threnody

Not I, but the noxious freezer beetling at our base.

Dante wandered between her uterus and nipples

Thinking it the base of Hell but Virgil

Was there, thought it to be the hulk

Of the great original city that he formed.

Whatever greater poets thought they trampled

Over, thought but could not perceive

Its breezes, snows, winters and a body

For sure is only the clothes that are made for it.


FOUR:DEAD ANTELOPES

If that dead antelope vomits on me
Just one more time, one more time:

I’ll leave for Zimbabwe, farm the grasslands:
This surreal poem just got hurled

At a rude dead antelope fucker
The one that torments me.

That vomits on me, drowns out
My cries for pathetic mercy:

Go on Mr Dead Antelope fucker
Burn it up, give me your best shot.

Paul Murphy