Garage Door
I wasted all last night
trying to talk my two-year-old cousin
out of going on antidepressants
He heard me out
But he wasn’t hearing it
I won’t repeat my argument
But you can imagine it
It’s the same push-pull
that preoccupies my afternoons
There’s an eye in us
bigger than us
an eyelid like a garage door
as heavy as we are strong
We’re always
busting a blood vessel
to slam it shut
or jerk it open
And the door
always moves too much
and too late
 |
| Another Broken Wizard, a novel by Colin Dodds |
Saturday Night
In the day all we see is wires
At night all we see is light
Dim damp raucous
Saturday night sidewalks prove desire
The bar fills with arias of howareya
Each drink transforms
oppressors to liberators and back again
open eyes alluring as a watery grave
A who’s who of who’s that
The bartendrix giggling grapples a foam-spewing tap
The bearded guy trying to pass for young Yahweh
argues with a mohawked woman
about how they should’ve been entertained
The tucked-in shirt checks his phone, concludes
This life is kind of a dud, isn’t it?
Everyone a dupe or double-agent
watching the wrong card
plotting to betray ourselves
Jugglers and tumblers
juggle and tumble into a common oblivion
Just dying to dive into the earth or into one another
that we may not die this night
The Pickpocket Tradition
Heavy hands and light fingers
abound about the Piazza San Pietro
Stumps gesturing, a man sings
A woman common enough to be a type
presses her wrinkled forehead into the ground
In the shadow of the indulgence-funded basilica
tour guides of all languages and faiths hook tourists
with promises of shorter lines
Beside the dome, Sistine Chapel
and colonnade of saints bracketing an obelisk
the ancient custom of saying it all with a straight face
lives on
Knotting My Tie
In obligatory hours
wrestling cufflinks
the wealthy dead whisper:
All Is Sales
Knotting a tie, the mirror shows
nature in the shadow of death
acting in kind-of-good faith
The nine-to-five tourniquet tightens
on whiteboard palimpsests of half-erased hopes
on calendars of days like cheap shirts—
too long wherever they’re not too short
Dreaming drycleaning
and borrowing on authority I abhor
dressing for a minor battle
in an undistinguished war
I check my collar
furtively
like someone who knows
he can’t afford bail
 |
| Heaven Unbuilt, poems by Colin Dodds |
Prometheus in the Drizzle
At night, officetops meander
through pink clouds of media
like pieces in a board game
with no objective
The sky ricochets between mirrored curtain walls
Little offices offer things like information
and information like things
Large offices offer consultation or consolation
The avenue below is a firefight of glances
Fallen angels and risen devils punish one another
for sex with sex and pretend everything else is afoot
The saints, who were supposed to have cleared all this up,
grin from niches in pigeon-proof netting
pensioners in an empire of crap
Aerodynamic angels don helmets
on the skyscraper’s mezzanine frieze
entitled Prometheus Tries to Renegotiate—
where the first miserable mark of human grift
sternly rethinks his supposed gift
While in small mid-block barbershops
that’ve been losing their leases forever
women cut men’s hair and send them off like little boys
to do untold damage
on this practice earth
