​Love Sonnet

Dear So and So: I love your dark mind,
the garden in your thoughts where snapdragons
bloom hard at the crest of the cerebral cortex.
Curve your hand around the dirty trowel.

Dig in the soft ground for the ends of worms,
stone and offal, thick clot of root and germ.
The soil rich, black like a turd in your hand.
Force it like clay through your fingers.

It's no longer a fine and private place you have.
I've written it out now, here. They all know
your mind now. The way it looks in there. How
you act. What it means for this verse of mine.

There's a beat before a poem dies.
Listen hard and you'll notice it. Here.

​
Monsters in the Body Room

Dear So and So: terrible things happen in the body room.
Small dirty men sleep in dead women's vaginas hoping a caul
will suddenly appear on their already-born heads.

Slick as fish oil & twice as nice as rice their horny
wives make complex dinners with organonal arrays
of spices: cayenne, garlic, paprika, ground pepper,

a shifting mix of menstrual blood, sulfuric acids,
& torn-off lips & hips and strips of flypaper
on which fairy corpses mix with fly-detritus.

It's quite a meal. Afterward the wives finger-snap the men
awake from their tryptophan naps, surround them with a cool
blue fugue of air, show them dirty pix of the Hottentot Venus.

The men jump and rave like frogs on a hot plate (no
I've never done that!!) while the women clear knife-wounded
bodies from the steel tables, cadaver fornixes open to the air.

The couples coitus themselves into stupor.
They love with what God has given them to love.

Crow Hollow Books

         The artist's space.

Murder One, Fall 2015

Rusty Barnes

NEXT >

About the poems: These poems present the poet's attempt to communicate with people in places or situations where normal communication is impossible.

Crow Hollow 19

< PREVIOUS