Poetry by Tom Armstrong
Dog Planet Hysteria
I am the oxygen
tank
The pudding salesman
Interior heat and exterior detachment
Swelling like a balloon, my tattoos
growing ever larger,
.....coming
apart till the bulldog's face disintegrates
.....into
a map of atolls.
The grass feels like cat hair
The trees are ladies standing
You can taste sugar in the lake when
you lift the water
.....to
your lips on a reed.
I say: Let your toes inhale the air
Drink to me only with red-eyed fluttering
heart valves
I am the ineffable Tao, barking.
I am the waterslide through the needle's
eye
The fingerhat of the taylor's
The haberdasher running after the bowler
who missed the
.....Chrysler
Building with his wrecking ball.
You are the craggy fiord salesman who
drew Norway
.....with
a palsied hand.
You like molasses on your steak.
Wine bottles rolling on the carport.
You keep a cider bottle filled with
an unidentified gas in
your closet to help you to understand
Sylvia Plath.
I dismiss mosquitoes with a flap of
my hand, but have
.....headaches
on mountaintops and name every
.....undiscovered
river Spatula.
Together, we could paint Mars blue.
You and I.
Artesian Wells
If water, pure
and refreshing,
Was black as onyx
My coffee would be a bowl of tar
Its steam as vivid as a waving hand
Our streams would be babbling flows
of ink
with trout blindly falling into the
paws of lucky bears
Thunderstorms would clean the air
of all its damnable transparency
so that tapping our canes through the
wetness
we could find our way to the local bar
to drink martinis the color of pitch.
The nights, then, wouldn’t scare us
so much.
They would be a comforting dive into
the enveloping
......blackness
of a pool.
The tonic sky with its carbonated stars
Would float like a boulder of ice.
And death would be no more than slipping
into a sauna
Warm water gurgling over our chests
The relaxed laughter of a closing circle
of friends
would fade into stillness as soft as
a kiss.
Oceans of Whales
I
don't want it to be perfect. A few things broken.
Withered leaves.
The high sky can be an uglier shade
of blue. I might
......even
grow fond of that.
I want children on the lawn laughing.
Their tears taken away in the buckets
of a firemen's brigade.
Oceans filled by crying that never happened.
Leviathans feeding above coral beds.
I have so many questions. I don't want
it to stop now.
I had no idea it would be so beautiful.
Thorns on the roses are beautiful.
Age spots on the old man's face.
Cheese melting on a hamburger while
I was trying to be
......a
vegetarian: Like a fitted yellow bedsheet landing
......gently
on a grey mattress. The corners grabbing hold like
......claws
of a cartoon canary.
Asleep not knowing I was asleep.
Awake not knowing I am awake.
Everything no less tragic than it is
wonderful.
Painful yearning as poignant as a baby
being born.
We live with Oceans of Whales.
I don't want to be pretend poetic.
How can I break through all of that
to say
we stand here in the not-far-distant
company of oceans.
Oceans in tumultuous activity.
Oceans churning with compassion.
Oceans infiltrated with generosity.
Lively with powerful fins flapping
The surf spray hitting the rocks
The plankton moving like a cumulous
cloud
An eye, enormous as a basketball.
A body, extended into the darkness.
We are here and we are all of that.
The Seven Seas teeming with uncountable
whales.
