FINE RAIN

We float like atoms
in the selfishness of fine rain
each to their own pair of shoes
jumping in and out of clothes
where the body is more obscene
than the slithering tongues of ice lolly sticks.

We occupy the shells of all things mainstream
locked into the handcuffs of a virtual reality
where tradition more rigid than
the constructed robes of hymn sheet books
throws their ancient songs at the contemporary
world of old folks.

We swim like fish in a culture of space and time
where the surface of things
more threatening than the patient gaze of egg timers
bore holes into the unguarded pens of fiction writers.

But in the portraits of their over development
Mona Lisa smiles
as the needle marks derail violently
as teeth are buried
as the black eyed peas of fisticuffs knock down houses
as the sugar cubes of horses kick in doorways
as the record decks of a bass generation

hang brothers loosely
strange fruits
hanging
and falling
in the struggle to rise
from the chains of themselves.

Ronnie McGrath

 

LINDA'S HOME

Electricity charging through the wooden window frame.
Through the front door.
Through the brick chimney.
Charging through the basement.
Through the skylight.
Through the reeves.
Through the mortgage.
The stuffed maibox.
Through out the front yard.
The garbage cans and the rose bushes.
The attic stairs, the peonies.
Vegetables in bloom.
An electrical Sabbath.
Christmas, Halloween.

The stone bird bath.
The clothesline leotards in the summer winds.
The children playing on the swings.
Electricity in the evening.
‘lectricity in the morn’.
In the kitchen upon the stove.
The coffee maker.
The fridge and the beans.
A newspaper upon the front porch.
The old radio upon the window sill.
The box of chocolates.
The old folks and the teens.
It’s that electricity.
A television turned off to July.
A morning visitor in the parlor.
A fascinated child.
An old box of love letters.
The song from Mother as she pins up the laundry be it in August
Or winter freeze.
‘lectricity comes from the heavens.
From the silent darkness of the Universe.
From the busy mouth of Grandfather.
From the evening cool summer grass.
In the early dawn
And the muddy footprints on the carpet.
From every late promise.
In the false agreements of lovers.
I stand beyond the illuminated horizon.
My hands raised to the heavens in prayer.
From the morning mist rising through the broken branches of silence.
I stand before the burial grounds of electricity.
Where the shipping crate bones of my old ancestors curse the earth.
Where my rubber boots sink into the soils of perfect relation.
I stand before the midnight oil where the rabbi seeks the active blame.
Where generations rot in ashen postcards of beauty and of shame.

I stand electricity in my heels.
My dentist claims the decayed rights of the New World.
The chair and the half moon poems.
Electricity rises through the antique roughage.
Through the morning garden of ancient dawn where children freeze in after breeze
And newspaper pages turn free in the sorry winds.
The bright handwritten memories.
The daily breakfast bowl of grit.
The evening lover faces insomnia beneath the trees.
Mothers, fathers remember not the wedding nights in vocation.
The sorted sounds of streetcar mornings.
The blind man crossing his life of true electricities.
I sit upon the hill of lonely high voltage grasses.
The natural pages and prayers.
The blind faith of an invisible god.
The midnight trainman signals his beauty.
I sit quite comfortably alone in the past-life references.
Where schedules and the light bright autograph rumbles
In the dark of an early winter morning.

I am pure like my father’s seed.
Like Mother in the sacred linens.
Where eggs are broken with new souls settling in the midnight motion.
I sit hanging my feet over the first rate graveyard of infinity welcomes
fresh flesh and sorry opinions of the fallen soldier.
The leery and the disenchanted.
The sacred and the midnight stone.
I sit before the ancient gods in Babylon and inside my worn out underwear.

The electricity of evening.
The plumber too leaves the morning for unpaid bills and flooded toilets
Of the sorted menace where the children stand
Like old memories.
Feet in the aging earthen clay.

Come now children
Rise and shine.
The lone paperboy delivers old news to the foundation of those homes.
Come now passengers.
Come now source.
The old priest lays dying in the sacred hours of the hovering mist.
I stand beyond the momentary horizon.
Amidst the old museums.
I stand beyond the final moments of perfection and of now.
My hands raised to the electricity of silence.
To the certainty of love.
I stand there with mud on my hands enveloped
In old prayers and final purchases
At the corner drugstore where I am given perfection and momentary wealth.
I stand sinking in my feelings like the reborn and the incarnated foam.
I am standing in the electricity in the morning.
And the emotional passages of night.
An old electricity
A photo and a prayer.
I sink into the hollow old fashion grave of my loving ancestors
Where I bury my last poems in silence.
Where I reveal my nakedness and appeal to the winds.
For now if not forever.
I stand without a song
Nor the copyrights of permission
To make love upon the electricity of the late night privacy for the poet in
the pages of scratched out stone.
I stand if not for together.
I stand if not alone.

Peter Leon