A soldier frames the wall
I heard life is a hallway in warm weather but
that didn’t work, so I bought a dozen little deaths,
yet tendered men are still in uniform action here.
This is the old orbit that God pointed, an orbit
very slowly moving, a wreck blinked back aboard.
This low interminable recession of pictured years
stings men like me.
I was bought, confined in a room where we
boiled in a pool of milk, where we were twins
transferred to a test tube ineptly built.
They made sure it takes years for us to mature and
even now we hang a bit confused when they call
every young man into a two week war, where we
all cook and brew in the center of a picture.
They say:
“Pleasure yourselves in quoting pictures.”
So, march lonely on through an opening in the wall,
where I light my fellow man’s way dow into the
basement of draft picks and twilight trials.
The boats and planks sink in the rubble of the year,
like bottles breaking, breaking down.
The rattling of machinery
turns the air into years of fake performances;
all of us dancing in the center of a photograph.
This poem originally appeared in The Grave of the Great Alley of Clarity Cats, an anthology of poetry written by Mike Giardina. The complete the anthology is available below:
Table of contents:
- Sun Shine Body
- On arrival in a lot of no civilization and plenty of letters,
- The unable to deliver
- An upwards slanted walk
- A familiar voice
- Those who have a standard way of going
- Left each chapter within us
- Warm smile not found in her cigarette
- To regain his composure for figures
- Food for rejecting his feet
- Even during--even if it during
- Lying on the floor, stretched after stir
- A soldier frames the wall
- A step by boulder
- A train by life station
- I was able to take the old north of town
- Fledgling
- Job
- Bradbury's closet
- A mummy's leggings
- Sipping mother's sweat
- Flash like an individual there
- I realize the skyline while playing catch with mother's death
- Running far away from a city, to return a week later
- Dysmorphexia
- Carried the clock over
- We have been meeting years
- Chocolate Italian princess
- Champion of Years
- "How much longer will I be able to remount the mothproof thrusting..."
- Over as rivers are over