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POEMS
Poems by Tom Hamilton
Where Her Heart Lives
Tail lights strung like beads on a rosary.
Like crimson lady bugs on an asphalt lake.
That rigormortis foundry is unsafe for keepsakes.
The quaking euthanasia of the wrecking ball,
decks the halls in sesquicentennial fantasies.
But modern or archaic carnal reveries
still match even under your most fended lens
almost identically.
Two girls stand in the Dairy Queen bathroom.
One sits on the sink and begins to cry.
Her skin is as white and clean as the hand soap.
She's bawl/talking something about "Stupid Jerks".
The tears crest her eyes as heavy as a chain.
But just as I identify and start to hate her pain
they laugh/spit/speak in promiscuous American accents.
Their tongues click and flex, jokes about oral sex.
Those thick sickening words drive romantics to gin.
Tonight I'm too afraid to pray.
I think that Jesus might have it in for me.
She hasn't said much since the rumors started.
She hasn't won anything with my dollars.
Like that strapless dress she's squirming away.
Again the stuffed animal jumps off the crane.
She checks on my table to make sure I don't touch her
and drops in another 'Caesar Rodney' quarter.
Why do people think I'm so funny?
I don't even hear the jokes running from my mouth.
Noteworthy imitations are easy for me.
I come to a particularly ridiculous story.
As my mouth pronounces she picks up the bowling ball.
She's the only person who is not laughing.
She's concentrating on the formation of the pins.
She draws a breath into where her heart lives
and knocks the towers down without a childish scream.
Found myself a restroom with a jail house lock.
Let all the agents pound they'll never hear the sound
of the tears disturbing water and jumping on the seat.
Took my heart for a little ride this morning.
I removed it from my chest and placed it on the lane lines.
It took off like a sparrow through a tangle of trees
Way up and a -weigh- into one of those moons
You can somehow see during the day.
Inner City Tree
Trash landing bumble bees search the girders for flowers.
Ride the subway for hours, searching for vines to climb.
Parking meters lose time, as the pawn shop door chimes.
Her underpinning's tied around the sewage pipes.
The dud buds aren't ripe, the concrete never grows.
And the leaves turn metallic, as silver as snow.
Deals which go down under her shade are shady.
A rubber degradation of tight turnakits and friction.
Until the prideful mind is fiction and the angst wades lazy.
A gray polluted haze makes the streets seem wavy.
When she was a fern we were a purer society.
But now the toxic garbage surges through our branches.
The tortured light dances when the railroad bridge screams.
And the foundry bricks fall, like hard spoiled fruit.
While the stinking, septic rain soaks into her roots.
Ignore the rummy scarecrow, of a bum at her base.
Like a black eyeless face welded into her trunk
Kicked from his bunk by the strongest of the weakest.
Smelling of apple cider and writhing in feces.
Pulling off pieces of his arms like they're bark.
No harm to green gardens, behind the alarms.
Mother Nature infects with no outside effects.
The brown insects ravage the body from the inside.
Constructing their leisure, while their landlord dies.
Ultimately tracks are visible, vivisecting white paper.
The song of the swallow, swallowed up by the bus horn.
The chics which are born- sample that lethal sap.
And no life may flourish, wrapped up in those traps.
Singing Galway Bay
When I was nine years old
my father and I went into
an elderly woman's house and it
was gasoline dry that Summer so
she had vasoline on her hands and they
went from lamb grease to ice cream like
a smile might move to a frown but ( So )
When she found me a rugged dip well
I supposed I had just best eat it because
my father weighed four hundred pounds and
his hand was like a first baseman's glove so
if you caught his kind of cold you
might sneeze blood all night and when ( So )
we sat inside that front porch screen
he started singing Galway Bay his big frame
it was vibrating and entertaining and she
began to cry because that song reminded
her of her still still Irish husband and
when my old man honed that final note well
he could have been a pro why everyone said so
but he was a pro of another kind so
before she had even sponged her eyes
she wrote us out a check for ten times
the amount of what the work was worth but ( So )
I didn't really mind too much because
I only knew of cheeseburgers and such and
baseball and coins and Evil Kneivel toys and
that I had best varnish off the rest of that
vicious sheep meat ice cream until
I could see the Flintstones and Dino
and they could see me
with lapped clean
porcelain eyes.
Biography
Tom Hamilton's work has appeared in over seventy publications including 'The Main Street Rag' 'Thin Air' and the
'Old Crow Review' among many others. Along with his wife Mary Theresa and their two small daughters, Tiffany and
Hope Ann, he lives in Memphis TN.