Unpublishable: Five Poems
16.11.17
[Wind blows my tanning bed open,
then blows me out of my tanning bed,
then blows my tanning bed over
onto me, and I hide under it.]
[You pull your favorite book off the shelf
and carry it across the room and spend
an hour or two trying to toss it
back into the shelf from there.]
[If they ever really did clone dinosaurs
and built a real Jurassic Park
it would be funny if a tiny, little
asteroid arrived and destroyed only it.]
[Ventriloquists caravanning through bogs
carry their dummies above the waterline
until their arms cramp up.
Driven insane by a new kind of rain,
scorpions sting the crowns of their own heads.
Seeking permanent escape
from unnecessary bankruptcies
celebrities promote perfumes derived
from martyrs’ funeral pyres.
Voluntarily confined
to office buildings, unicorns
poke elevator call buttons with their horns.
And angry at everything
everywhere angels break harps
over each other’s backs
like wrestlers with folding chairs
to the tune of handcuffed composers
battering harpsichord keyboards with their foreheads.]
[The sun sumo wrestles the moon.
The wind stiffens only to droop again.
Out of the unedited gutters, along the roofs
of the neighbors’ houses, gout golden gladiolas.
The neighbors are always lawyering up on each other.
Most adults molt into hideous, money-winged children.
Friendships ending are blamed on the wind.
Time tightens; books empty.
Frost prospers. Seals loosen. Only luck
lifts statue eyelids
with its rumored yields.]
——————
Mark Leidner is the author of Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me and The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover.