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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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JOHN DORSEY
bullets over broadway and bombs over columbine i thumb through the paper like most average americans just trying not to get blood on my hands as children huddle up in some colorado park waiting to be let back into school newsprint opens flowers fields of bloodlotus have started to spring up across the flatlands of ohio and along the prairies of lawrence kansas and i think about japanese high schoolers at some ancient prom in nagasaki could they smell death on the surface of their gymnasium floor did they think am i dreaming the ghosts whose blood got in the punchbowl? they really knew how to slow dance in moments of crisis remember to whisper they won't even teach us auden's "funeral blues" cuz he was a little too queer they come riding horses through the streets of lincoln nebraska whispering random patriot acts named after abbie hoffman what is the meaning of all of this? remember to keep your head down the teachers say in their best underpaid voices of concern american children whisper back hiroshima monamour they are the new anti-social samurai waiting in the infancy of suburban caves in prayer for an end to our consumer holocaust to create an international language they whisper peace like it's going out of style in the words of harry chapin i want to write a love song just because there are sheep waiting to be counted on pillows of regret where socrates agreed to hold his tongue because there is a song beyond the meaning in my bones tonight a cherry that refuses to be popped even after you drag it through a river of shit and let me tell you i'm sorry that i'm the reason why you had to learn how to swim the rocky river, crossing over a once raging now quiet body felt up by the infirmity of autumn beauty seems relative to where i am standing when the sun seizes up goes down leaves crush under my feet the sound of crickets mating to 1960's dooooo- wooop some say the riverboat captain of the dead once slept here cradled in the sun's memory moaning the ballad taught to ghost children swaying on mandolin the story of our birth was once merely a string theory rotating the placement of the record needle onto a pile of radiant bones John Dorsey currently resides in Toledo, OH. He is the author of "Harvey Keitel, Harvey Keitel, Harvey Keitel" with S.A. Griffin and Scott Wannberg, Butchershop Press/Rose of Sharon Press/Temple of Man, 2005, and "Moshing With The Cosmos" with Iris Berry, Magenta Press, 2005. He can be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com |
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© 2007 Underground Voices |
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