Weather
Here, have a tie-dye
on those stripes,
just a touch of white
trash black on those
flaming Hawaiian flowers;
It’s suffering succotash,
dear, a hard-won head
ache
a purple-headed heart
ache
every blasted throb
a 9-to-5 retail job.
There is scientific interest
in your own destabilization,
clothed to the point of suffocation;
major dope addiction
dulling a literary dullard’s
pain
with stutters of sodomophobic
relief.
Trading Cards
shy boy over there in the dark closet corner
rum and coke bought with four appropriate queens
leave the disorder and win two thousand Sahara dollars
little big smoker’s breath blond
awesome dick duel sound effects
great Vegas comp room investment
baby gay behind the magazines
longing looks of solitary prom night lust
three hour naked Italian opera hug
shower and stay alone
parking lot stairway erection final act
don’t remember the buffed balding name queen
cheesy client confusion luxury room moves
unrewarded fake date cab fare efforts
cheap little man boy Charlie Brown look-a-like
back of the bookstore mouth seduction
midnight friends versus reality divorce
PWA dinner fee rent-a-car scene
no drug money hostile Key trash bitch
babble drugs leftover bourbon holding on
long haired jail bait jail bird
garage hugging cracker drawl and all
bed laying stoner waiting to get laid
Alabama butt boy booze hound blow job buddy
no name Fremont welcome wagon rental
cheap train station trade
summer too hot for homos in heat
hand painted olive oil body
one sided juice without phone numbers
dirty politeness look all round later
drop dead little dumb homeless boy
overpaid with beer and a silk tie
inscrutable nip bar bitch
package showing oh so sorry
oh sexy man oh let me touch no kiss oh sexy man
smart and shrewd German rail slut
leggy long hair sweet foreskin cowboy
video booth immoderation and sophisticated conversation
named after a poet street address for special friends
let’s make a thank you for the cocktail deal
Hawaii orphan business talk
pseudo bonding psycho Tuesday boyfriend
hidden gentlemen’s shirt lure hard-on
fag friendship freak out fleeing
ass aperitif room service
hell of an old lechered student doppelganger turn on
wee wee hour stereo enjoyment
big time new car and new house pro
eminent ad postcard and word of dick breath mouth
a Coronado beach boy to remember
so desperate duckling street trade
nothing but boy trouble beer bust
same sorry faces looking for Mr. Goodbarfag
horny smoky drunk and still choosy
wound too tight how ya doin
not much pride in this kind of flex
date dick or daily darling
the dancing gypsies take the wrong angles
come to chat, leave depressed
the gulag is getting to me
Seventy Octobers
to DSCH…
I – Lament for a dead infant
In the sepia glow of hope,
we try to forgive the newborn
for one day knowing they will expire,
reminding us how fertile the dust is
that runs like cycles of the moon
beneath our quivering skin,
a malformed secret we keep from babies
lest they choose to disappear before they wake.
II – Fussy Mummy & Auntie
Fuss and fiddle, this cow licked, unparted hair,
it’s pictures today, everyone will make fun;
tuss and tangle, your freshly rumpled suit,
it’s church tomorrow, God will know you’re not freshly pressed;
bubble and squeak, the pepper in such mean boyishness,
it’s girls who cry in the playground, shameful dancing like that;
roil and rubble, our good names ruined,
it’s all those damned books, cleaving a river between us.
III – Lullaby
We tell ourselves, sing babies to sleep, caress them.
Buy flowers, say we love someone, or candy
to sweeten the pebbles rolling up the path.
It’s all indignity to want the candy store
or the garden or the bakery or the toy shop
just to smell like we’re still breathing.
We make a hobby out of sketching lieder,
to make believe our psyche won’t feel autumn,
to ignore the winter scribbled in our margins.
IV – Before a Long Separation
This lifetime of wander, thinking,
in some queer moment,
an embarrassing sleep will emerge.
No plant or animal or fish knows such,
whether they profit, unclear.
Dressing for work appears
existentially redundant, eating, sex
other than liking the taste of it,
trying to answer questions tired
wonder gets that no one asked.
All the world, crowded, badly ventilated
and we’re already bound, not speaking
from matrices of doubt
all nature has forgotten doesn’t exist.
V – A Warning
If ever an augury had graced the sky, it was some time ago.
The rest is just good manners, as the clock finds midnight
and we realize whole atlases had been inside our eyes
as we travel by now through ourselves, on the way
to a terminus we never really left in the first place.
Mothers, they knew this chime all along.
VI – The Deserted Father
The warm hand that squeezes a boy’s
shoulder never landed, the idea of it
a pilgrimage whose stomach growls.
Too much grey biography –
a manhood, a birthright, even –
seems mislaid in baggage no one
can find on the accepted blueprints.
No tears follow. Old age got to them.
VII – A Song of Poverty
The radish and onion grill our character
but is less than a withered grain of rice.
A dead cell phone cries out in tongues
but is a chorus compared to a throat’s crackle.
The traffic – the horror!
but a sniffle in a buffet of malady.
Every landscape is a masquerade, only
a burial ground truly recognize the days.
VIII – Winter
The dust of last season’s grass, tidied in frost
and yellow, unknowing mud frozen into place
as corners of forgotten leaves glisten across
the swirl of ghostly snow, breathing
with diamond finality our shared epoch,
the sleep of our remarkable compassion.
IX – The Good Life
The imprisoned revolutionaries toil in the kitchens
to feed victorious guests clamoring in the doorway.
The diseased build and rebuild the same palace, carving
over-sized furniture from the very churches that lock them out.
The useless, near extinct animals form a galloping choir
harvested to perform Wagner, poolside nightly.
Whole oceans turned brown are siphoned into canteens
owned by the lovely and the landed, as if by law, if not destiny.
X – A Girl’s Song
In a crystal parfait of jewels, a woman sparkles,
a golden nectar schooling verse
in a synthesis of every gender, where pleasure –
the irreversible binomial of all eventide
in an earth where symbiotics blend space and time.
XI – Happiness
There’s a special desk at the State Office
of Dead Letters just for me.
In my postal egotism I keep writing, on tenterhooks
I’ll one day answer myself by mistake.
But in the Ides night, an anniversary letter arrived
that sealed my imaginings with its tang.
To this I’m required new-fangled postage,
perhaps even a new domicile so that I’m sure
to receive seventy eras of new correspondence
following me, from compassion through liberation.
Adam Henry Carrière is a poet, teacher, and former NPR broadcaster. His writing has appeared in Tonopah Review, Mad Swirl, Apparatus, decomP, Alternative Reel, The Smoking Book, Counterexample Poetics, Pushing the Envelope, Mayo Review, Juked, Zygote in My Coffee, Chiron Review, Strip, Tattoo Highway, and The Bicycle Review. Born on the South Side of Chicago, Adam now resides in Las Vegas, where he publishes Danse Macabre, Nevada’s first online literary magazine. He serves on the Editorial Board of Popular Culture Review, and has been awarded the Literary Arts Fellowship in Poetry from the Nevada Arts Council.
