Discuss.

Discuss how best to save dinners
gate-crashed by hand grenades;
how forever misaligned Feng Shui
awaits homecoming amputees;
a corpse wagon is no less grotesque
in the wake of Father’s incense;
how those less likely to perish
acknowledge their tragic flaws;
I tend to break at the pool table
when it boils down to the black ball;
you insist that your AWOL queen
is to blame for an atrocious endgame;
how we are easily put to shame
by cheap makeup parlour tricks; 
mascara liberally applied
can make an onion vapour tear
appear to us sufficiently severe;
how as a foreigner in a foreign place
I spend hours at hand dryers
playing their heat to my face,
evoking our homeland’s breeze;
how they weren’t trees we climbed
in youth but wooden mountains;
how hate gestates on kitchen stoves
in accordance with traditional recipes;
how my job embellishing obituaries
inspires a beautifully bleak dream:
to leave behind a posthumous opus
so epic that once in love with a page
commit it to memory, comrade.
You may never turn to it again. 

 Copyright © Gareth Durasow, 2008

Back to other poets