Joey Cloudy online

A Triptych of Poems for a Dead Poet

Dead Baby Blue 

for Robert Trammell 

Beware,  

Life is not a dream 

even when dead birds 

lying drunkenly in the gutter  

suddenly straighten Verona  

feathers stand on broken feet of poems 

vomit a gut full of idealistic maggots  

eyes swimming against the … bone, 

 (alabaster, ivory, eggshell, porcelain, pearl,) 

undertow of parasitic insights 

bitch-slap the asthmatic atmosphere with the soliloquies 

of rigor mortis wings and fly  

with the wind-blown remains of ashen  

poets thrust into the stillborn blue sky.

  

As If  

for Robert Trammell 

As if the breath of a poet could resurrect the dead 

bird silently decomposing in the slate colored street. 

The curb ascends, a tombstone for so much road kill;  

a squirrel here, a cat there, somebody’s whistling  

calling a dog that cannot answer but this mourning 

the bird with Verona colored feathers was lying 

in the middle of the sidewalk as if he had heard  

the wind of a poem and tried once more to rise. 

                                                   

Bird Flew 

for Robert Trammell 

Silent as sentient shade a colossal crow wheels 

golden eye over Mecca and drops 

something it has stolen from its beak. 

Sometimes, when I walk down 

the Lakewood’s sloping sidewalks I see 

your reincarnated corpse, skin shriveled  

as a shaved scrotum, ants crawling over unblinking 

eye. And I stand here looking down on you 

looking up into a wind who hides 

behind a cloudless sky this sun light feels 

cold on my skin while noon looks a lunar 

eclipse and avian shadows challenge our resolve. 

5/28/06 12:55:24 PM