An American Papyrus: 25 Poems | Page 3

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Copyright (C) 2002 by Steven Sills
AN AMERICAN PAPYRUS: 25 POEMS?by Steven Sills
Post Annulment 2
Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes?through?Solipsistic muteness?With an exhaltation startled and choking.?As the sun blazes upon the terminal's?Scraped concrete?The shelved rows of the poor men?Hear the sound die on the pavement?In a gradual dying echo.?A cigarette succumbs to the voice as?Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people?awaken;?And a man spits toward the tire of the bus,?But misses.
And as he watches his own spit vanish?From the hard crest of the world,?And silently scrapes his lunch pail against?A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale?to bleed...?And hoping it would bleed...he tries to remember the?angles?He and his wife stood to project?The intermingled shadows that both?Had labled as their marriage.
He enters the second bus:?Its coolness sedating the skin that?Overlaps his troubled mind.?His thoughts pull together?Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning.?He feels a little pacified.?He knows the shadow's intangible depth:?Its vastness having overpowered him these months?Until he could not reach the logic that told him?To find himself outside its barriers.?As he stares out of the window?He wonders why she has left.?How could she have left without indication?When he has remained angled toward work?So that he and his wife can stay alive??In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face--the?windows?Of the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance,?Piercing solidly through its head. He rings the bell.
The idea of her not home, and legally annulled?From his life--her small crotch not tightened to his?desparate?Thrusts--makes him feel sick. He gets down from the?bus.?He goes to work. He suddenly knows that being in love?is not love.

Earth
I use her earth to plant my seed--?My limbs twisting around the collective molecules,?Trying to dig in.?Only the obscurity of my body?Presses so fully that it is neither?Body nor bed nor the intersection of both,?But euphoric traction;?And then, planted and repulsed,?Only the seam of backbone minutely faces her,?That bed of earth.?With all conscious force?I breathe the aloneness that untangibly defines the?Air. I swallow its ambrosia?Of depth and ask myself?Why I ever married the woman.?There is void.?Then a hollow answer calls my name and says "it was?time."?I realize myself in movement, parting the scene.
I use what has been planted for the reaping--?My suit tucks me into its structure of cotton;?And soon a building will be again the structure?Around men of cotton suits, pushing a product.
Lost, I drink my coffee alone on the stoop.?She had asked to fix me breakfast?But I would not let her.?My miniature is one and black.?I drink me in when I am not?Pressed by the coffee's steam.?Cars' casketed phantoms of people?Chasing up and down Dunlavy Street of Houston?After something--their whole lives after something--?Come and go from consciousness like respiration.?The people plant and reap.?Who can count all of their?Insignificant names?--?Animals that are not created sensible enough?To propagate unless lost to frenzy,?Caught in structures without meaning.

Bar-Room Buddies
We Mongoled Human experience.?We pushed it into our mouths?As the crisp pretzels of which the shape became salty?dust?At our tastes: the crispness of life,?And we Mongoled human experience.
The tequila, that Sandras or Cassandras, or whomever?it had beeen?At the moment of malevolently blessing our heated and?Maddening consumption, was what we left?Our wives for; and then hardened ourselves on?The springless cushions of the sofas of our friends?Whom we eventually forgot the names of:?The wetness of human experience that we Mongoled,?And felt the bladed emptiness?Of stomachs that couold not consume food?On mornings after. But the Angels of bar rooms?continually?Appeared before darkiened stages where, in front of?guitars,?We played. They apppeared at various stages to the?weeks of the years.?They