An American Papyrus: 25 Poems | Page 3

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*SMALL PRINT! Ver.12.12.00 FOR COPYRIGHT PROTECTED ETEXTS*END*
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