Five Poems By Timothy S. Meyer

This Meyer tries to keep up with the women :  wife, three daughters, two cats, twelve chickens.  He and the dog lock eyes furtively.  The dog's been neutered; they both work in the trades.  He has been most recently published in Zombie plus Blue Collar Review and Neologism Poetry Review and hopes to release a chapbook before the Big One gets him, tentatively titled The Jungle of Self Pleasuring.

Transformative Exercise

Father, on a morphine meter out to meet the pain
in suspenders, black box on his hip;
didn't like the loss of control and would not push the button
as we sparred with our eyes in the sitting room.


Now he walks by the river to find a driftwood bole
shaped like half a walnut shell, weathered,
about the size of a soft-shelled turtle, thick but light.
The river rolls slow, painfully clear,
like gelatin with a purpose.


He stands on a rock to release his find.
His girl, half in half out, watches it float.
"Look father," she points underwater, " a bobcat."
and there it is, transparent and spotted
like a trout, and it rises
becoming gryphon,  then deer as it moves
up past him touching his cheek with its nose
whereupon he gives it a piece of baklava
he finds he has been eating.  


Royal Jelly Collector

the sound radiating over the crystals
has a hollow box quality pierced
by high squeaks from the inner facets
that can cause water to seep from the elbows
this explains the rubber bedspread


these intense cells are beyond the vision of a cave
their sounding makes one hair stand
the size of a microscope


forest life antennas precipitate a grip
set the jelly on the bed then long weeks
crushed rain for groceries
can't go out for the map and white room with Big Bee
keep coming out of his noises


Bird in an Envelope

Mother's dead but I still get letters
from the tax man.  Her chimes sound in the back yard
whenever a black van goes by.
The children have learned to duck and cover.
I wish to have been taught such things,
we were just told to buy plenty
hot dogs and cart the dry ice
down into the shelter.

I have her pink slippers still
that I wear under the new moon
to make little slices into my porch rail,
gobbling the white tabs and trembling
to the ju-ju beat that is always around.

Play your hand straight
and be sucked up by hooded drones
or confuse the situation.
It is following canyons in the blood;
you will always hear the grinding teeth
at the moment of change, might be
the wife eating salad over a blues tape
or something in your chest that is vast
and no doctor can ever explain.
Right then, you make your move.


that forgotten song

when the automatic night
with its groves of squalling trees clamps down
the cold fever sings out the deeds
our flesh can do by day
that we are too timid to imagine


the snake's black iron eyes
float up over the smooth hill's rim
there she stands ready to climb, serene,
up to the place where cold feels like heat
she checks the feelings of the things she sees
here one heart burning faster than the rest
in a fire at her feet
so she puts it in her pocket and ascends
and we can recall the rest
how the heart grew old as she climbed
into the world and went to her place
there to be and put the now stone heart
on the mantle where after years
the rain pounded in and it broke open
and produced a purple seed and on and on
I just wanted to hum a few bars
to help me remember that old song


ZooM

We watched the monkeys nutting off
like a purge.
The bars were getting thin.
You dropped the yellow vinyl purse
and a tube
of peach lipstick rolled out.
I extended it an colored my throat
to the sound of apes freaking.