| june - july 2007 Issue 12 |
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POEMS
Summers End
You will not be able to answer
these uncommonly large questions
like where have the birds gone
and will they come back.
You think it a matter of maps and longitudes
and all day the fast thinking sky has drained you.
You are sure
the birds have instinct, color, and light
but you haven’t been blessed
with the courage to hunt them
As evening cracks
you hum a noisy tune,
a secret code to retrieve
the birds.
It is your grace, your blessing,
your falling into willow baskets
lined with fur, your talisman.
Traveler
Kicking at your brain in the sunlight.
Living in windowless houses, walled in
courtyards. On the day of the dead the
half witted traveler rose and witnessed the
ritual of a violent death-an immediate tingling
in the loins, with thousands of burnt flowers
dying under a hot sun an immense backdrop
reminder of a man suddenly plagued by a
carrion soul fisting itself into a ball of flies.
He flutters at the mouth,
standing immobile in the heat and dust, slowly
swatting at insects that seek entrance there; a hot
inferno that befriends yet publicly kills. He tries to spit.
Nothing. He becomes aware of the whining clotted eyes
in those around him. No mercy for lost shadows.
Fireworks rise and sputter. God, he manages to think,
will keep the entire world dancing until the very end.
He knows he has grown old. Car lights interface each other.
Angel demons indivisible in the ochre colored fields, in
the fallow slanted hills, are spreading their legs for the
insemination, for the seed of a nations pride.
Bullet the fast food cancer, the flushed victory of a
moonscape, the slow ascent from sleep to water to desert
to those gnarled Mephistopheles in coffins of algid sweat,
cutting, grasping, percolating madness slicing hot metal,
money melting marshmallow bed sheets in mellow pumpkin
light, don’t daddy, it hurts it hurts, I love you said the
Bitch goddess, vulva to the promised land.
In lane ways, street corners, smoky rooms crumbling brick
and steel, the ancestral howl of the wolf. The traveler turns,
feeling the knife embedded in his neck, where all the lovely
buffalo used to roam.
He feels his knees welcoming the earth.
Dies slowly, wheezing like a folding accordion.
64 Dodge
We came from the west.
The sun never hides there.
I squinted for days
at the rolling velvet hills.
Our lungs could find no warmth,
only glistening strips of ice
and frozen pebbles that
I felt like licking with my tongue.
Wanting truth I get only a specter
of habit and the brilliancy of a dead star.
Gary Pierluigi was a freelance journalist and a Social Services Worker who, in 1996, became a quadriplegic. He has
been published in numerous literary journals, including CV2, Quills, and Queen's Quarterly. He has been short listed
for the 2006 CBC Literary Awards, and received an honourable mention in the Ontario Poetry Society's "Open Heart"
Contest. He currently has a poetry collection under review, and is completing a book of short stories. He now writes full
time.
Summers End
You will not be able to answer
these uncommonly large questions
like where have the birds gone
and will they come back.
You think it a matter of maps and longitudes
and all day the fast thinking sky has drained you.
You are sure
the birds have instinct, color, and light
but you haven’t been blessed
with the courage to hunt them
As evening cracks
you hum a noisy tune,
a secret code to retrieve
the birds.
It is your grace, your blessing,
your falling into willow baskets
lined with fur, your talisman.
Traveler
Kicking at your brain in the sunlight.
Living in windowless houses, walled in
courtyards. On the day of the dead the
half witted traveler rose and witnessed the
ritual of a violent death-an immediate tingling
in the loins, with thousands of burnt flowers
dying under a hot sun an immense backdrop
reminder of a man suddenly plagued by a
carrion soul fisting itself into a ball of flies.
He flutters at the mouth,
standing immobile in the heat and dust, slowly
swatting at insects that seek entrance there; a hot
inferno that befriends yet publicly kills. He tries to spit.
Nothing. He becomes aware of the whining clotted eyes
in those around him. No mercy for lost shadows.
Fireworks rise and sputter. God, he manages to think,
will keep the entire world dancing until the very end.
He knows he has grown old. Car lights interface each other.
Angel demons indivisible in the ochre colored fields, in
the fallow slanted hills, are spreading their legs for the
insemination, for the seed of a nations pride.
Bullet the fast food cancer, the flushed victory of a
moonscape, the slow ascent from sleep to water to desert
to those gnarled Mephistopheles in coffins of algid sweat,
cutting, grasping, percolating madness slicing hot metal,
money melting marshmallow bed sheets in mellow pumpkin
light, don’t daddy, it hurts it hurts, I love you said the
Bitch goddess, vulva to the promised land.
In lane ways, street corners, smoky rooms crumbling brick
and steel, the ancestral howl of the wolf. The traveler turns,
feeling the knife embedded in his neck, where all the lovely
buffalo used to roam.
He feels his knees welcoming the earth.
Dies slowly, wheezing like a folding accordion.
64 Dodge
We came from the west.
The sun never hides there.
I squinted for days
at the rolling velvet hills.
Our lungs could find no warmth,
only glistening strips of ice
and frozen pebbles that
I felt like licking with my tongue.
Wanting truth I get only a specter
of habit and the brilliancy of a dead star.
Gary Pierluigi was a freelance journalist and a Social Services Worker who, in 1996, became a quadriplegic. He has
been published in numerous literary journals, including CV2, Quills, and Queen's Quarterly. He has been short listed
for the 2006 CBC Literary Awards, and received an honourable mention in the Ontario Poetry Society's "Open Heart"
Contest. He currently has a poetry collection under review, and is completing a book of short stories. He now writes full
time.