4 Poems

Bird Song

Another day beforeThe NextWarRain likely

MockingbirdTunes Up

Potable waterNot luck

HelpSome

Picnic These memorial horizons

Promised translucent

Now old thought

In young clothes

Closed to them

All those in heaven

Shake their heads

Especially the collaterally

DamagedHeadless Buddhas

Shake whatever they can

The Pope shakes his finger he's

God's lawyer and his client is

Dead This war's got a IIAfter itA child of 13

Will see it twice

Last time

During potty trainingOh young recruits

Always be wary of a man

Named for his fatherNaming maims


Shoes to fillFill 'er up quick

Let us send our potatoes

Out to be mashed

Before duct tape shuts

Our million dollar bashAnd we can't

EatThe fresh and meatyResultOf every war

And don't forget

To seal the door

Cluster Theories

fresh water ~~~~~~~~~~~~a chunk off the icy dicey

Emigre Martians
Now American
Politicians
Everything's a clue

but where's the mystery?

Historyantique mediumno more owned

by the winnerthat sinnerand his

Stupidly regular dinners

Try to find
Your true
Home

What if time
Flowed backward
Unreading each word

Color lends weight to
Weightlessness
Now red's the new

Dark matter
A repulsive force
On large scales

And those huge clusters
Refusing
To behave

When my country looks
Forward it goes drawkcab
Check out the photo
With Rover's rear
End
Landed part of the content

Let us count the continents
And the incontinents
Soon to roam The Last Frontier

And loaf meatly on its astro-turf

Like take-out?
Ready for zip codes and zoning?

Stuff ads moaning girls say you need?
Last call at the Hotsy Totsy Club

Pass me a glass of water
Call if you want to go up

If we don't answer, we're either on another line

Or helping somebody out the window

Did you say laughs have syllables?

Why be alone when you can be impulsive

Macy's now sells
Tediomatics

Slices dices chops tedium into smithereens
Homeboys and girls

New pearls
Wanna wear your country's
Real neck on your sleeve

So easy to flag you
Down on my planet



Face Value

All night the wind blows horizontal rain, whipping the facade. If one were walking against this torrent, one would have to bend to it, to protect one's face. Palm trees, bamboo know what to do. Humans stay in their beds, prone to excitement. In an earthquake, a woman hid under her pillow. The tremor settled down, safety returned, why should she face it. Each airport van incites surprise. One would open the door and the deceased, now undead, would stand with suitcase in hand, all face. Weapons of doubt destroyed and now peace reigns. Instead, a man with spit in his beard, drives up in a rusty corvette for a chat. Not the face that launched a thousand rowboats down a merrily merrily merrily. Rain begins again precipitously, falling in a vertical fashion. Why do people get the face they deserve? Why not another face that someone else deserves? One's face could be mistakenly placed on a body that didn't belong with it. After a facial, the surface is red, inflamed from the fussing. Put the paper face up or down, one can never remember, these machines, each requiring a different position. Still again, now sun. In profile beautiful, one side belying the other, two-faced. Nothing in that face reveals anything other than itself. Perhaps the eyes reveal the soul perhaps not, perhaps the soul is under construction. Countries engage in face-offs. One goes about one's business without a face. A face is for others to view.

The Young Keep Dying Abroad and At Home

Tired anemone shoots last bloom
Neither lassitude nor industry
Impress the machinery
Of neat hedges & Kalashnikovs
Hand over those scissors to cut the hair
Of graves one strand at a time
Something blazing some city razed no this
Fatigue has a name abhor dolor honor
Push brooms galore sap soaked leaves
The inevitable debris of time gum
Wrappers quarters to account for
Inflation petrified fish bone so
Far from the sea a 9 mm shell
And thee fair garden so far from hell.

Gloria Frym is a poet and fiction writer. Her last book of poems, Homeless At Home, won an American Book Award. She is the author of two critically acclaimed collections of short stories, Distance No Object and How I Learned, as well as several volumes of poetry, and articles on photography and other visual media. She teaches at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area. A new book, Solution Simulacra is forthcoming in 2006.