explosion on the freeway

i was afraid it was a gunshot
right through the rear window maybe it missed
me by a few inches but there wasn't
any projectile and no blood and i passed
two exits doing 70 before i was able to turn off
to check i kept going a while i don't know why
little pieces of glass kept falling even with the car stopped
the thing just exploded i found no trace
of anything like a decision made
without concern but based perhaps
on most important concerns of
engineering and stress and maybe somehow
there was something tossed at the car
something that shattered the glass and so
based perhaps on doing damage then
running away i stood in the 7-11 lot
thinking of when i tied my brother to a tree
my dad drinking buttermilk with his lunch sandwich
and his ulcer my mother that time she left
with the suitcase she always had ready
for those hospital trips but this time she left
because her own words argued against her
because the laundry needed to be hung out the window
because my father said this and that
and i said this and that
and the house was quiet your mother,
my father said softly, your mother
and our hands were folded for two days
as she hid out upstairs with the old italian lady
the guys who replaced the glass found nothing inside either
it just exploded everything fractured
then new glass installed so we could see

read this poem! 8/27/05

Shane Allison's Poem for Lee Ann Brown


east/west

*

In You That's Not Me


Unquenched by fog this is

the manner in which it is said.

My eyebrow droop does tricks,

want to watch? I've made such sad

the willow a medal returned to the widow.


Damp passage to rub your shoulders up on.

In a moment there's light,

a symptom of less-concerned, less conscious.

It turns over.

I mistake the fog, think it you. My fog, so familiar.


I want fog as god,

teach myself the gradations of the sublime

to know every tremor. Only one who loves

knows you are microtonal.

My fog is not you.


But still in the still

ness of fog there pass cloud echoes,

void drifting in light, assurance:

these are like you. You were not made

to be sweet, nor dark. A twitch of your leg

should be enough, my eyes are closed, you draw me in.

The mess I've made on your leg glows,

do you remember me not saying it,

or what you said before your face?


Well, the fog is not cryptic,

not at least as a wading pool, or the wooden pews.

So we substitute one word for another, one thing.

We're no smarter for it,

and then we waltz it away,

contest it's alive. I've thought of you

as frail,

wet seeds without sun,

possessed as another,

kneeling before me.

Picture one day your heart giving out,

you sit at a seaside window and sigh.

You then have no clothes,

you're touching yourself.


I tell you Go On.

Fog over the water, feel it?

It's not my fog, in you

that's not me, me, you.

But yes you me me you.

*

tiny cityscape

i imagine a day in the city
rain, rushing to catch a bus

and see this kid standing alone
small and his arms held straight

and he cries and cries as people
skirt glances down at him (and as

i watch), and the rain is louder,
i can't hear the bus

or the cars or anything, he cries
and looks around him slowly,

grey and black raincoats, dungarees,
and i'm still running for the bus

but slowly now, maybe that's why
the rain hits me harder now

and none of this happened, i only imagine it
and see then myself hop on that bus

if i thought about why i rode off
this would read differently

from the start. just remember
how he looks, this boy you see.


~

SPIT TOON at Salty Dreams

INCEPT DATE 8 5 05


Post poetry, crit poetry, ignore poetry.
Practice tolerance until it hurts, but be assured
we wish no pain. Hip us to your faves,
discuss closure, explain again why verse
isn't necessarily poetry, why old words
or unique words or cliches
or the annotated arcane masterful mishmash
long poem haiku bouts-rimes
this-is-my-life-and-i'm-sticking-to-it
minimalist maximus dream poem
poem is/is not valid. What would
an Ashbery/Collins collaboration
read like? We'll never know,
but we might wanna post on it,
for fun. This is getting hokey;
I hope you get the picture by now.
The ubiquitous challenge, judged,
unjudged, begrudged, desludged,
sized-up, prized and forgotten too.




http://p198.ezboard.com/fsaltydreamsbook2frm37

Further Back

I have a picture of my dad
looking very small, standing
in snow on a mountaintop
in Iceland,
and it has always been surprising to me
that he looked so happy
bundled up in the cold

later he drove officers around
through Europe, the
Netherlands, he'd say,
Brussels, the Netherlands,

and he liked telling me about
some three day pass and I imagined him
in grey rain, eating hot soup
maybe trying to forget that
what the fuck am I doing here?
feeling, cold sense of alone in the snow
maybe more tremble than smile
I kept this little black and white picture
in many old wallets, along with one

of my mom young and standing in a ray of light
in front of a wooden wall on the back porch
of the top floor apartment i was born into,
her dress a sadder sense of gingham now seen,

secure for the moment both parents immigrants
these two pictures always together in old wallets
snow and sad sunray before I was born this is
how they were before I was born


~


8 5 05