hmack

Lately

Human Hospital
By John Harmon

It takes effort to speak:
shuttering miasma; summer at simmer
this atmosphere is an incredible personality forced upon us,
forced upon us all as it forces itself into our sunburned skins
into the sad faces of children waiting in the back seats
they are waiting in the parking lot, we are waiting too,
and it takes effort to speak at them.

We have been creeping or resting in the dry cistern
of wage labor, damp-moist and hot, not potable
and we get the cheapest beer:
down at the county line, up at the state line
passing over those pavements, through those intersections:
withering are the farm roads
writhing are the church roads.

Just yesterday you were standing on the ridgebeam
hammer holstered, western light - glorious in standing repose:
it was then when I thought you statuesque, but now,
you are shuffling nudie playing cards
slumped in a broken ladder-back chair.
We will play only two rounds.
We are in the union of a rough league
and our hearts are vacant coal-mines
or open quarries filled with pastel waters.

If a woman were to come here
I would at once perspire and gasp for air;
I would quake in the wilderness.
I would not feel alright.
I would forever search these grounds for a burning bush.
Such is the nature
of the otherness she possesses.

Pass into fall.
when that sycamore states in a slow tilt,
silhouetted fingers, frozen in the frame
of her final clutch and grasp:
death is slow and happening.

Were we wealthy or better
this then would be a hunting lodge
a structure devised for bourbon a-plenty and dirty jokes;
a rustic haven far off from the work day litigation.
alas, this is my house - cinder blocks and what.
from this vantage I can see the moon on the water
but I cannot see the moon.

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Robot Lake
by John Harmon

I remember a quiet cove at robot lake
the plunging bluffs, moon over water
I wore a colander on my head
and make a funny dance.
she spooned yogurt out the portal,
glop by glop.

We maimed a diver when the anchor was dropped
She gave him a band-aid and a candle.

that night we made a daughter
of corn husks bound with plumbers tape.
We placed her in the neon bassinette
Perched in the starboard berth.

stillness was the water
stillness was the wind

our daughter is older now
her professors insist she was adopted
I bravely tell her she was purchased
from a sandwich vending machine
in the bedroom of the factory
where her mother and I had met.

My god, we made beautiful garbage-bags together.

My daughter says to me:
A pelvis is like two little skulls
each with a single Cyclops eye
and both so delicately curved.
The hip is a hinge-pin, an eyeball to the socket,
a shift-stick, a crude and primitive weapon.

This, for a father, is hard to digest.
And I, in my own way, do respond:

The hammer, anvil and stirrup
are located in the inner ear
I suppose there is a horse somewhere
grazing on the lush pastures of your thought
this horse is wild
and runs from the bonfires of your mind.
do not seek to break or not-tame this horse.

I remember robot lake
when we had devised the shape of you
and that horse is your own
unshaped by the fingers of us.

I pushed a dust-mop
and dragged the cuffs of a blue jumpsuit
as she leaned against delicate wrenches
Lab-coat and skirt;
shearing the heads
off of little expensive bolts.

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Art Photos: http://flickr.com/photos/goldrobot/
Other Photos: http://flickr.com/photos/vanator/
GR Records: http://www.gold-robot.com/records/index.html

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And so it goes….

—————————————–
emailing.
vanator@gmail.com

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