Five Poems By Ed Coletti

Ed Coletti is a poet, painter, and fiction writer.  Recent work has appeared in North American Review, The Brooklyn Rail,  Hawai’i Pacific Review, Spillway, Noir Nation, and So It Goes: Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.    His  book, When Hearts Outlive Minds, was released June 2011. Germs, Viruses, and Catechisms was published by Civil Defense Publications (San Francisco) during December 2013. He now is working on Apollo Blue’s Harp, a poetic-history of music.edcoletti@sbcglobal.net

Big Bill’s I Ching of What Sex Is

Strength enters what is fragile.
The receptive receives power
though power resides in both
before much penetration,
or such activity would be without
appreciable fire much like a magnet
possessing only one pole or
the other but not two which
grab at each opposite deliciously.



Bukowski
                    Makes Me Happy

Drop in
to Trehorn,
start to read
Bukowski who’s recalling
a rag man and
his exhausted horse
during the depression.

So I ask myself

Is this poetry?

Not
everyone else
thinks it is—

He makes me happy and
Black Sparrow grew out of him.
so of course
it must be
poetry.

Hookers nudie dancers
barrooms made him
happy just thinking
about them— this Charles
or Hank clobbering
that loudmouthed Irish barkeep
who the others cheered to win—

So it goes with drunks bums addicts,
saints pleasuring in memories
bathing in our own brief smile,
never again wanting
to kill after wanting to
kill that rag picker who was
possessing and whipping another
ancient mangy mare.



Born Yesterday

Each fading week measured
in garbage cans carried,
blood pressure pill refills,
in photos of the babies,
fruit fly generations,
NBA basketball’s
hoop-raw rookies,
overnight veterans
retiring shortly after
senior prom photos,
proud-mom-captured.

Today I read that
one such pro athlete
who’d shot someone in the face,
later murdered a so-called friend.
Friendship can be very complicated
within this business of rapid aging
played out in texts, tweets, and
killings, sort of explaining why so few   
give their lives to or for another—
way too dangerous, these rapid-fire
connections’ fleeting flights.



When I Fall In Love

steel steel steely
scat scat scatting

diz diz dizzy

ah ooh dah
siddle diddle dee

what’d ya say?

saba diddo dee
diddee diddle dee
didalee diddle ding
yah ow oohh

Hollywood

I’d really love to go to
Hollywood

ooh ya
ooh ya
koo!



Please Aerate the Poetry

Some poems poets send me
stumble through underbrush,
choked with cloying perfumed flowers—
roses delphiniums astrolabes
gladiolas pansies lupine
lavender lilac snow globes
perennials foxglove philodendron
aereolas labia sundial
phrygia philoxera trident
neptunium cadmium phallus
nasturtium philanderings and wisteria.
—When my interest remains aeration,
the silent slither of a single earthworm
unshuts my pure and only expectation.