Speed Dating
First kiss, tongue in mouth. You zombie. A tryst with a twist. My 60 seconds in your embrace, you astride your inner horse, dead though it is. Normally, I have to admit, decay is such a deal-breaker. That or politics. But who can afford therapy? I took the pills. So touch me with your lips’ remains, let me touch the tattered strands connecting that and that. Work along the borders. There where lightning illuminates our altitudes. Based on base attitudes, of course, my erotic wreck. Can’t you now see yourself, despite the weather in your vision, astride your horse, dead though it is, reflected in my desperate eyes?
Reality Made Easy
You’ve
dressed yourself in lavender and green. Fashioned a Boudicca from the
cells of your reflection. The moment a form of art becomes invisible.
Your gestures an incantation in a wilderness of blood. Those painted
ladies. Remember? In Dread County they lifted and lowered their
wings. Uncommon disturbances domesticated. You burn them with your
voice. Water birds whiten the horizon. Small birds fly beneath the
surface of the stream. White with its noise. A network of thread
entangles our desire. A trailing thread you follow toward your
destination. The adolescent frigate bird blown a 100 miles off
course. Stranded and bewildered. We breathe now in unison, catalog
the weapons of our resilience. Cast our voices into the inarticulate
earth and try to speak.
Days Like This
The jacaranda’s lavender petals fell through the night and fell through the day. Hadn’t they removed the tools and the bodies yet? She let him talk for 30, 40 minutes she imagined to her sleeping phone. She steps out into the lavender drifts. The air muted, humid, slows the hours of her acceleration. The black phoebe spreads its wings and fans its tail in a patch of dusty sunlight. Its brown feathered edges remind her of. Among a red profusion of climbing bracts, clusters of eyes. Although the reverse is also true. She begins to paint the portrait of a dog. This has happened before. Paints instead a spider skittering into abstraction beyond the frame. There where the story and desire begin.
Bio: Patrick Cahill received a doctorate in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. A chapter of his Whitman study, Whitman’s Photographic Eye, appeared in The Daguerreian Annual. He is coeditor of Ambush Review, a new literary and arts publication, and currently has poetry in you say. say (Uphook Press), CLWN WR, and Homestead Review (California Writers first-place honors in poetry).