http://drunkinamidnightchoir.com/
The link above will take you to a relatively new online journal, “Drunk In A Midnight Choir,” which published three of my poems this week. I don’t submit to publications all that often, so I’m always pleased when pieces are accepted.
The work being published in this journal is excellent, and I highly recommend adding the publication to your reading.
My thanks to the editors for their kind attention.
–T
(the case for war)
because it feels
like I’ve learned how
to sing using
only blood
because I step
on my own tongue
chasing it
because between
the legs
is how I feel
rage
because I can buy
one boxcar full of lawyers
two boxcars full of editorials
and a whole train more of ginned-up rage
to ease the way
once it begins
because it can last a long time
it might lose its flavor
like old gum
but still stays firm
when it slides
up and down on the tooth
because having something sliding
up and down on my tooth
makes more joy than anything else
I can think of doing
because somehow
glamor and honor still congeal
around last charges
last stands
lost causes
and because they don’t give out
the good jewelry
for dying while asleep
A specialty of the fabled
electric sand-eel,
a creature extant only on
my mind’s favorite desert island,
is its ability to regulate its power
so that in one stroke it may bolt
across a room to kill or
perhaps light a fire
for worn travelers.
Among the creases in the folds
of the skin of the imaginary
pocket elephant
one may find
the algae, called by some “manna,”
which saved the Israelites
on their forty year stroll to
what they call home.
The solitary helicopter wing
of the bass wasp,
the blank face of
the spotted closet snake,
the fully functional heart
growing on the outside
of the Damson’s plum warbler:
can’t you hear that external heart
pulse as it’s calling you,
doesn’t the sting of the wasp
throb within you,
isn’t that
the tiny drumming
of the elephant’s feet?
Go ahead and admit how real they are,
how real you’d like them to be,
then make them more real to everyone else —
repeat these stories of their existence up and down,
praise the habitats they inhabit,
sing hymns for their well-being and
soon enough they will spring
into just as full a reality
as reverse racists,
welfare queens,
and the culture affirming smile
of Chief Wahoo.
They once spoke of her blooming talent
as if she were a flower or at least the soil
a talent grew in.
They whispered of her dropping out
as the bloom coming off the rose
or as the fading of early promise.
They stopped speaking of her at all
and she was better off for it
once the garden metaphors
were gone and she
could simply work
on what she was born to do…
Her brother on the other hand
worked hard and forged his own path
right up to the moment the world
passed him by and he was cruelly
neglected until he disappeared
and it was a tragedy
they mentioned in every review
of her work from her first triumph
to the late career retrospective
which was titled
“Final Fruits,”
of course.
Dark Matter 