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Devon Brock Aug 2019
I like burnt coffee,
the black half cup in the ***,
evaporating into syrup,
tongue-rejected but swallowed hot.

I like bent smokes,
cracked at the filter,
pinched and squeezed,
dispersing joyous poisons,
some to the lung demanding:

Each day begin bitter, imperfect,
stiff into addictions of dawn,
into the drawn curtain ways
of waking.
Devon Brock Aug 2019
Passive frictions generate little heat.
Strike the flint hard into steel,
and let the kindling flare
to dispel the spell of darkness
of hate and the grim fuels
that burn without fire,
without compassion,
without warmth,
without the near spent coals,
still glowing,
that nourish the soul
with clear broth
in tough bowls.
Devon Brock Aug 2019
I lost something that night,
after the play where the gun
ground across the stage toward us
and stopped.
The final movement
in the final act
before the dim
and applause.

It never grew old,
a ****** comedy,
with ****** songs
of prisons, ***** and ****.
It was our fourth time
at the Annoyance Theater,
where we could smoke,
laugh, bring our own beer,
trip on acid, sit on pillows,
and laugh.

Trip walking home, a yellow cab backfired,
you ducked behind the mailbox,
Clark and Belmont,
"That ain't no backfire, *******.
Get down."

But I froze.
A boy screaming "Pendejo!"
through a hole in his thigh,
thrashed on the pavement,
tires screeched, pigeons jumped
to distant perches, and everyone
was running, running,
running away.
Devon Brock Aug 2019
If I
had not leapt upon the weathers,
I would not know the rain,
neither the soil soaking violet rain,
nor the mountain rounding violent rain.

A train upon a scheduled track,
rarely derails. It is calculated thus.

If I
wonder whether leaping forth or falling back
into safer briars leaves fewer scars,
exhilaration would be a foreign land
of laughing fools with burnt hands.

Gain versus loss is the work of accountants,
profiteers and venture capitalists.

If I
had not turned away from her,
turned from evaluations of with or without,
turned from the doubt, the wish, the one last kiss,
my hands would never have found yours,
and blue upon hazel unite in the faint
few seconds, standing on a cliff,
together, above a deep and narrow pool
into which we plunged unthinking.
Devon Brock Aug 2019
Down the deer path, thick with ****,
to every hard to find
creek bank in the world,
there's a busted dinghy,
a forgotten sloop dream,
with a mudstuck sprung transom,
a sky beckoning bow,
tied to a cattail or some other
tenuous stem.

Down the deer path, thick with ****,
the willows, reefed in a gale,
cringe in the rising crest,
and a busted dinghy
lifts on a swell and bellows
against the cleat to slide clean
to the sea, to a young boy's
landlocked dream of spray,
hard weathers and anywhere
but here night-watches.

All the colors of elsewhere,
the splendid regatta of the never-seen,
the gleaming spice and bent strange
tongues of the could have been - mold,
dip and sigh, lift and strain,
again and again,
upon a cleat,
upon a rope,
upon a cattail
or some other
tenuous
stem.
Devon Brock Aug 2019
The first time I saw you cry,
even the flies got wet,
worms scrambled like Israelites
before chariots and damp chaos.

I never knew your aunt,
but maybe this was your first
touch of dying.

You told me she gave you Chex
on the brittle days, cookies
on the soft lazy days,

Spoke Danish and laughed
because the horses knew the ways
and all the sisters were named for flowers.

The rocks tumble into the glade,
and all the flowers wither,
even the flies get pummeled,
and the nightcrawlers
drag the mapleseed down.
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