Good Metaphors
You stare at me
through an imaginary egg
held between your thumb
and middle finger.
Your face painted,
light ruby in eccentric light
that stains the fiction,
the make-believe yolk,
a human pink.
Good metaphors
don’t need to be explained.
Good metaphors
don’t even need to be
Good metaphors.
The egg is a metaphor
you say but do not explain
as you leave it,
balancing
on the nightstand.
In the morning,
My fingers search
the empty canyon carved
in the mattress, where your shape
was indented softly
by the rose hued comforter,
carefully cast aside.
A broken pink yolk,
sliding down the bedside,
running across the floor.
Another Drive Home from Work
An evening pool
is being dug deeper
in the backyard
of June sky and
the cloudy-with-
a-chance-of-rain
-workmen
are dropping
orange peels from
their lunch pails
that burn like hot
coals and then
begin to sink
in the new dusk,
headlights on US 31
awaken from
their day-long drowse
and bring with them
the roadside fireflies,
and a new pulse
of summoned stars
that shine bright
in growing black
like teeth in the nocturnal maw
that yawns a summer breeze
and exhales the smell of alfalfa
into the open nostrils
of homebound highway cars.
Newport
My foundation is napkins.
Melted butter soggy, easily
torn and sleeping through
these pretty New England
miles. And the gulls, with their
rusty swing calls, remind me
that like the first bologna
sandwich of summer, I am
lazily assembled and unwel-
come, at this table of lobster tail
and steamed red potatoes.
Halogen
Motorcycles on McGalliard
are lowing like injured cows,
under a purple pastoral
of evening sky,
their solemn cries carrying
across parking lots,
and like cocktails, they mix
in the drunken ears
of bar hopping moths
Winged speckles,
inebriated satellites
flailing from lamppost
to lamppost
suckling light pollution,
out of the goodness
in their hearts.
They eventually stumble
through an open bedroom window,
to caress a bulb of atlantic blue,
and have a seat
on the shoulders of
a Saturday night shut-in
where they impart
their wars stories
about sadness and bats
between hiccups, half hearted
and staggering slurs.
“They were inkblots
against the moon.
Living Rorschach tests,
that fashioned the fates
of our mothers, our brothers,
our daughters.
Their sobbing
drowned
in Harley engines
like our sorrows
in 90 proof halogen.”
You stare at me
through an imaginary egg
held between your thumb
and middle finger.
Your face painted,
light ruby in eccentric light
that stains the fiction,
the make-believe yolk,
a human pink.
Good metaphors
don’t need to be explained.
Good metaphors
don’t even need to be
Good metaphors.
The egg is a metaphor
you say but do not explain
as you leave it,
balancing
on the nightstand.
In the morning,
My fingers search
the empty canyon carved
in the mattress, where your shape
was indented softly
by the rose hued comforter,
carefully cast aside.
A broken pink yolk,
sliding down the bedside,
running across the floor.
Another Drive Home from Work
An evening pool
is being dug deeper
in the backyard
of June sky and
the cloudy-with-
a-chance-of-rain
-workmen
are dropping
orange peels from
their lunch pails
that burn like hot
coals and then
begin to sink
in the new dusk,
headlights on US 31
awaken from
their day-long drowse
and bring with them
the roadside fireflies,
and a new pulse
of summoned stars
that shine bright
in growing black
like teeth in the nocturnal maw
that yawns a summer breeze
and exhales the smell of alfalfa
into the open nostrils
of homebound highway cars.
Newport
My foundation is napkins.
Melted butter soggy, easily
torn and sleeping through
these pretty New England
miles. And the gulls, with their
rusty swing calls, remind me
that like the first bologna
sandwich of summer, I am
lazily assembled and unwel-
come, at this table of lobster tail
and steamed red potatoes.
Halogen
Motorcycles on McGalliard
are lowing like injured cows,
under a purple pastoral
of evening sky,
their solemn cries carrying
across parking lots,
and like cocktails, they mix
in the drunken ears
of bar hopping moths
Winged speckles,
inebriated satellites
flailing from lamppost
to lamppost
suckling light pollution,
out of the goodness
in their hearts.
They eventually stumble
through an open bedroom window,
to caress a bulb of atlantic blue,
and have a seat
on the shoulders of
a Saturday night shut-in
where they impart
their wars stories
about sadness and bats
between hiccups, half hearted
and staggering slurs.
“They were inkblots
against the moon.
Living Rorschach tests,
that fashioned the fates
of our mothers, our brothers,
our daughters.
Their sobbing
drowned
in Harley engines
like our sorrows
in 90 proof halogen.”
