Poetry by Janet Buck
Pain’s Parasite Mink coat mantras of your grace are sonnets on a page I hate. Not in mean maneuvers-- just in envy’s evergreen. I take a bath in pinecones of your peach fuzz knees. My legs are horses put through Hell. Mind grows cabin fever wishful. Cannibals with shiny teeth. The cab fare of my thick disgust seems at times like ticking clocks. The grand collapse of rolling chairs: canopies that rule summer, urging muscle ukuleles just to strum their meager music, even in a rattled limp. Your bones trade favors of a step, live bloated by sweet fairy tales. Paperback panache in tact. I am queens of unmatched seams. I stare in fevered crystal balls, see the amethyst of age. Tickles of a poet’s palette almost always tied to grief. Paintbrush thrusts of empty silk pajama legs become my ghosts in greasy alleys, most of whom I can’t control. Pain’s parasite I study hard-- a wretched class with high tuition breaking broken steeples more. I live like driftwood on a beach. A tablet made of stone and grit. Olive smiles in quick corrections saving face from falling off dry canapés. Effort grows so very old. Art is hungry yellow jackets hovering thick chicken wings. ====== Candor’s Hammer Consider a bomb. Cross it with fire. Comb it with grief. Burn it with ice. You’ll be inside my urgency-- taste kidney stones before they pass. Know courtrooms filled with phantom pain that plead the Fifth of wanting fifths. My body cast will be your stateroom floating on a sinking yacht. I order ill to take a nap. Unruly children never listen. Storms of fate act similar. Cab fare of a fountain pen spreading wings in cyber-space, running all the yellow lights before they turn to absolutes. Driftwood bones I hate to own leaking oil and losing gas, but dead set on their pilgrimage: pinching fingers in a door of motion they can never have. Tap candor’s hammer hard enough, truth will follow chorus lines. Nuns in habits; monks in cloisters; rocks in rivers; skunks in ditches comment on a life they missed but worshipped like a bible’s spine. ===== The Bag Lady Layers of her evening shroud in twilight holes where stars belonged. A crossword puzzle of my flaws splattered thick on sticky tar. Helpless seemed like cotton candy running pink without a fair. Brown paper sacks rolled in crepes. All she had for self-defense-- bayonets of rainbow glass. Arms in sleeves-- tamale husks of hurried fear. Bottles sold for blessings of their emptiness. I saw her hug a jug of wine as if it were a fountain splayed with arteries to earned release. Dropped one nickel of a poem in pounding puddles of her blood. A Chaucer on her pilgrimage-- a pigeon lost among our noise. ===== Fake Lightbulbs I followed your tracks. Ignored the force of pain’s eclipse. Didn’t speak of suffer’s dandruff. Didn’t dabble what remained in cauldrons of self-pity’s womb. I earned (but burned) the right to scream. Listened hard to judgment owls that ruled thick forests with their hoots. PC art is in the trash; I take apart confetti flags; I learned I leaned on lousy sticks: depended on glass fairy tales that didn’t give me room to breathe. Reading dawn by 30 watts of failure’s fear; blind to rays of deeper suns. Sorry roads of silence reigned with riding crops of snappy pride. I hid the gift I owned alone beneath a tent of travesty. The bible was my set apart: mine, all mine in every step. Never reeked of commonplace like blackbirds on an evergreen. One leg wrestled from the grave by surgeries and magic shows. The other was raped holidays-- bones removed--earwigs brushed off normal skirts. Money bought me rubber feet, but didn’t pierce the underlying tragedy. Shapes I learned to hate and hide: I was turnips sliced to pieces faking it in apple pies. ===== Haunted Homes of Poetry Cleaning up saliva mess of forty drooling silent years, I press my form against a mirror like flies that hit unlucky slides of nature’s bad biology. A step ahead of funeral pyres, I play an untuned violin-- sins that quiz their basis some but never fathom hurricanes. Leg of lamb I couldn’t eat. It was something’s motion crest. And I was sure he’d want it back. No one wants to hop on grass even in a coffin’s arch. It was cruel to eat nice dreams-- a save-the-whales mentality in centers of a world war. Hailstorms and hairpin turns become a turret for release. In haunted homes of poetry, my shape is plates for Hell’s Buffet-- measures floods of urgent skill. A sonnet in mint jelly plops-- decorates a serving tray. Wisps of parsely sparsely farce-- it never does reverse the kill.