Dean Johnson

Type and the words shall appear.

The Contagion of Ruin

by

I’m standing in the ruin of an old building. It’s an office building.  I can tell.

I’m in a shirt and loosened tie standing there among the tilting concrete slabs

and re-bar stabbing out.

Fuck. Everything is bent, broken and twisted.

I’m standing in the wreckage in front of a cigarette machine. Can’t find a quarter.

But I need a cigarette so fucking badly, though I quite so, so long ago.

And then an old man

a hobo

a bum

shuffles up.

He punches the glass of the machine again and again with a bloody fist

until the glass cracks and packs of cigarettes tumble

to the tray.

DuMarier. My old brand.  Each red pack in a strange configuration.

Packs of 24.  Packs of ten. Some tiny packs of five.

Some opened and half empty.

The old man me.

Type and the words shall appear.

by

Type and the words shall appear.  A punch. A rock through a window.  The fiery finger of a subducted  and boiling mass.

A stretch to fill all mornings. A skip across the waters. A slide down a slippery slope. A lingering note.

Red fading in lament that the sting may linger but never last.

Prose and poem in part, in past

present and shifty now, all searching for a finger’s grasp.

The Opera Singer.

by

You look like an opera singer, she said

puffed out shirt and pin legs

untuck your shirt. get some fucking style.

Thank God, I thought.

Respectable is getting old

and I’m forgetting how to sing.

The Old Slap and Tickle

by

Just the sun I needed

but blinding too late

to keep meaning from the memory of my eyes.

A key for every knocked down door.

Every ivory slapped and tickled.

The bruising and the pallor comes upon the Sunday face

and the jowls of Saturday night.

Life is but a lingering death.

by

They wobble when they walk

not knowing

they are the dead

and tremble at the cawing of the crows.

But not me.

I walk steady laughing across this tilting land

calling out:

“Here come rest upon my arm.

Life is but a lingering death

and leaving it no harm.”

Content Protected Using Blog Protector Plugin By: Make Money.