1.2.26

Three Poems by Alex Rainey Ward

Muezzins

 

Trying to tame my wildness

my hair’s askew

my hair’s on fire

my wildness is up to no good.

In the Zoo Shop there are

10,000 parakeets,

each one of them happy

as fuck.

I knocked on Death’s door and

Death ran away,

I thumped on Death’s door like

thumping a melon to see if

it was ripe yet.

My wildness is on fire

my mind is the muezzins’.

 

Waystations

 

I feel so candid in my naked body

sitting here on the couch with a

towel under my ass

with the man tits I fought so

hard against

just like my mother trying to

rid herself of her little

potbelly,

using bogus products she bought

for $9.99.

Finally she gave up,

she’d rest her hands on her

little potbelly and eat buttered

Pop-Tarts, slumped down

on the couch.

A couch, a TV, waystations.

Demurely, I’ve drawn the

curtains

but the naked light bulb’s

blazing

I want to throw open the curtains

and appall the night.

It’s 2 am, the city’s timid.


Railyard

 

The night’s a railroad track, the moon’s a train, and all the rest is ash.

The dark matter of the universe is just ash and cinders,

something enormous was burnt, maybe the body of God,

sacrificing himself in the act of creation.

And everything’s still unfinished, in disarray,

the Kuiper belt, for example, which is maybe hiding the

real solar system with a better Earth in it,

this one’s only a rough draft.

The night’s slivers, spars, spurs of a railroad,

the rails look like silver hissing serpents’ tongues.

Ore cars parked on a siding, a cashiered old

passenger car, an old dining car still coupled,

going fusty and musty, like a man and wife rotting in the grave together. 

Maybe from the chaos of the railyard a train will

gather into one long thing and start

rolling through the night, thrumming rhythmically,

rocking gently side to side, carrying everybody home. 


Alex Rainey Ward