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JOHN DORSEY
Dogs playing poker you can feel their chants a whisper on the back of your neck the ghosts of unborn children know to place pennies over your eyes when dreaming to keep quiet to pay the ferryman that time requires a certain amount of levity that love asks for a leap of faith but sometimes just needs her beauty sleep and over their objections death is laughing over time, the poet death is laughing as if this were staten island as if this were ellis island as if this were the coney island of lawrence ferlinghetti's mind time is laughing how long has this been going on? the ghosts of unborn children you know that i was almost one of you a loveletter placed in a bottle strewn off some pier in the hawaiian islands almost never sent and over time, death is laughing over our objections the poet death is laughing and under a streetlight ghost boys sit skipping stones and ghost girls play hopscotch with spirits emptied out bottles of dewars and if you listen carefully you can hear their chants like those monks recorded on cd we are simply dogs playing poker we are the ripple death is laughing so don't adjust your tv set that ping that pitter patter it's just your whisper it's just a shadow child it's just the laughtrack kicking in the politics of modern dance on the news they are talking about war blah blah blah i find it all very depressing what the american people should really be worried about is me on a dance floor move over fred astaire i wasn't blessed with the gift of tap when they blew up the world trade center my feet... were the bomb we never saw coming they are going to send our boys to a land i've never seen & i can't two step i once told a woman that great poets can't dance & she laughed saying that i must be the greatest poet since shakespeare don't get me wrong it's not like i don't care it's just that i might want to get married someday & the thought of that first dance freaks me out more than any stray bullet that might hit everything but my feet what the troops need is someone like John Travolta as a drill instructor i don't imagine that George W can dance any better than i can & lately i've been thinking that all our problems can be boiled down to a simple lack of rhythm so you won't catch me doing one last tango in paris texas my steps would be the shot heard around the world louder than the screams from any fallen shuttle so when everything passes or until we experience the kind of end that jim morrison must have been talking about i'll just send a silent prayer to mr. bojangles who must be rolling over in his grave with the knowledge that america can no longer get by on fancy footwork i was born dead to a mother 6 months pregnant bracelet around my wrist like a noose with a baby ghost heart beating a fading truth the kind you have never spoken or known and i can't remember the last time you smiled waiting to be reborn faintly pounding on the door of my apartment another birthday gone by a mute whisper on some forgotten god's billowing tongue John Dorsey is 27yrs old, and currently resides in Toledo Ohio. His work has recently appeared in fearless, Spent Meat, James River Poetry Review, Typewriter Voodoo, Out of Order, and Mystery Island Magazine, as well as the recent collections, "Little Boy Beat:Selected Poems" Paladin M&E, Inc. 2004, and "The Dusty and Lofty Dreams of Middle Class Fairy Princesses" James River Poetry Review |
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© 2004 Underground Voices |
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