"brickyard" poems
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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Stuff of the moon
Runs on the lapping sand
Out to the longest shadows.
Under the curving willows,
And round the creep of the wave line,
Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters
Make a wide dreaming ***** of an old pond in the night.
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an ocean feather snuffs it in an alcove, to my leftjust another pair of lungs to expand and swill the seaand i wave curtly to the ***** on the next corner(nothing to see nothing to see) kindlingher shoulders against the lamp-post shelooks more like an angler than a good timeand paint by number peeling swips, lightning strikesupon her hips and the smoke machine pumps nicotinethrough out my veins, on the verge of somethingepicglitter lines the gutter with a sunless pulse all its ownand concrete currents sweep the ground beneath my feetas i exit the aphotic zone:ale stained blouses and hardened nipplesmake my artist type jealous beneath the soft neonsof the brickyard pizza sign the whirlpool opens with asureness of free beer to soften my mindand i've done this enough for the anxiety to subsideso i kick off these shoes and iDIVEinto a plethora of flannel jacketsand guys named 'steve'
Feb 23, 2010
Feb 23, 2010 at 7:26 AM UTC
Boys in a brick labyrinth
retired structure
two boys coming to age
bricks, bricks, bricks back to their first days
Hallways like blood veins through their body
like gold veins through this cold mine
They know them intimately
seemingly with no ending
Left right left left: a drummers paradiddle
stairs up, stairs down, chambers and iron gates
vast expanses, great pillars stand guard
Sentinels of the brickyard
Miles, unfathomable tons of red rock
The Courtyard sky so blue and so outstandingly high
Summer nights under endless whites
the bricks outnumber these lights
Hide and seek like you've never seen!
never stray too far
count to 50 - ready or not
There's always a new spot
Boy hides and boy seeks to find
footsteps echo off of every. single. brick.
Imagine his face, the boy with blonde hair
as he runs around the corner and finds a girl standing there
Mar 5, 2015
Mar 5, 2015 at 11:58 AM UTC
To the boy who crosses the brickyard with sorrow on your face,
Come cry with me.
To the girl who crosses the brickyard sassily tossing your hair,
Come strut with me.
To the guys who cross the brickyard arguing,
Come debate with me.
To the professor who crosses the brickyard worrying,
Come share your troubles with me.
To anyone who crosses the brickyard wearing sunglasses when it is cloudy,
Come hide with me.
Come fill me with your emotions, your troubles, your cares.
I am just an empty shell, waiting to be filled by those around me.
Let me live vicariously.
Nov 12, 2012
Nov 12, 2012 at 3:32 PM UTC