That’s Just the Way I Stop Talking
By Rich Ives
A swagger of a song lisping from the leak of his throat, a rasp of weather like territorial bravado?
No such action, no razor of clever banter before the misplaced bump and grind. And the baby clapped happily for the stuffed toy, already in a better world.
Then the earth beneath his mother's lung garden fell, cigarette smoke commandeering the vital organs.
I hope I have not shamed you. I hope I have not disguised the fears. Isn't it lovely the way the ugliest ones free us? A beautiful rat of a peach dripping with wounds and gorgeous clichés.
I had to let out a little of the certainty. Otherwise it just hurts. Father wouldn't approve. The careful little shit.
So hello hello from the useless shoes and the closets and the lost destinations in the elders' paws, trailing smoke across the escaping boat that rocks on the carnal waves like jellyroll, hawking up expectations with a pretty little lilt and tussle of petticoats dipping decorously towards the invisible shoelace anthems of the departing river.
Male child motherless, I am not the name of anyone or anything that claims me by proliferation, or by falsifying my passport so that I am forced to participate freely. It only proves me wrong again.
I am named: Not This.
Or I am named: This.
A movement between.
- - -
Rich Ives is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. An interview and18 hybrid works appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he has been nominated twice for Best of the Net.
By Rich Ives
A swagger of a song lisping from the leak of his throat, a rasp of weather like territorial bravado?
No such action, no razor of clever banter before the misplaced bump and grind. And the baby clapped happily for the stuffed toy, already in a better world.
Then the earth beneath his mother's lung garden fell, cigarette smoke commandeering the vital organs.
I hope I have not shamed you. I hope I have not disguised the fears. Isn't it lovely the way the ugliest ones free us? A beautiful rat of a peach dripping with wounds and gorgeous clichés.
I had to let out a little of the certainty. Otherwise it just hurts. Father wouldn't approve. The careful little shit.
So hello hello from the useless shoes and the closets and the lost destinations in the elders' paws, trailing smoke across the escaping boat that rocks on the carnal waves like jellyroll, hawking up expectations with a pretty little lilt and tussle of petticoats dipping decorously towards the invisible shoelace anthems of the departing river.
Male child motherless, I am not the name of anyone or anything that claims me by proliferation, or by falsifying my passport so that I am forced to participate freely. It only proves me wrong again.
I am named: Not This.
Or I am named: This.
A movement between.
- - -
Rich Ives is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. An interview and18 hybrid works appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he has been nominated twice for Best of the Net.
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