Poem to Another Poem
This poem reads itself by the light of itself.
Speaks of itself in the fifth person. Believes
in me more than the devil does in evil.
There will be no generic blessing. Right
now this poem is powdered concentrate,
translated from a 100-foot echo. I am
a conduit for your coincidence. You are
uncanny and resist the tourniquet of sleep.
Sometimes I am a box of afraid. But you,
the hell-bent juggernaut, like the cracked axle
on an 18-wheeler out of control jack-knifing
into my heart like a perfume. You give me
the capacity for the noise of fire. Give me
the breath for another poem on fire. My
voice is not the voice of the poem. My
handwriting collapses, sucked into secret
whirlpools. I write poems with revenge
over the third hand I used to have.
Habanero
They say to catch the devil in the act,
we need to set the trap within ourselves.
So, one summer twilight in Gainesville, Florida
after a jar of homemade dandelion wine
I tramped into our steamy backyard garden
to sing aloud the newly painted sign:
‘Abandon all taste buds ye he eat here: 577,000 Scoville units’
One step away the habaneros hung
like the little gonads of demons.
I leaned down and bit the pepper right off the twig.
While my tongue was being excommunicated
from the flaming church of my mouth, I was forced
to wonder whether God was feeling this. Was the devil?
Were they laughing? Ten thousand snowy nights and ten
thousand Niagaras could not calm the anger of this
dangerous vegetable whose power kills bacteria, amnesia,
and the milk of human kindness. Yes, I cried. My ears they
cried too. And then I ate another.
Sweet & Sour Lifespan
(at the sift of the clock)
I walk west into my body
(unleashing my language)
the seed of a single voice
(each syllable a knot of slang)
Dew awakens from its fathom
(coming from the other side of day)
in a brighter silence
(of only the moon being clairvoyant)
to a sky whose blue has been shed for a door to water
(umbilical to the horizon)
airtight from laughter
(an equinox of confusion)
My life a fuse that has been lit
(by a spasm of light)
Yolk
It is from a sentence of bird, I am but of stone.
My mineral wings spark against a subterranean sky.
I am eggless, but round in my bones.
The moon takes to sugaring the trees
while crickets chirp in F sharp major.
A cloud passes by without a word.
These words I say with an unknown breath,
wait to become mystic again. I free myself
from Chinese handcuffs, but my belief
is stranded on syllables of anxiety.
I travel headlong into absence where
the opposite of happiness is not sadness
but boredom. I feel responsible
for the falling of stars as astronauts
who return to earth half as strong
as they were. But be careful
with what’s resurrected.
In the sub-basement, a weather balloon
lurks like a prophet. My halo
isn’t made from halo, it is halo.
—————-
Stephen Lindow earned an MFA in Creative Writing from UMass/Amherst in 2004. He’s been writing since 1986 and is very active in Tampa Bay’s poetry scene. Recently, he led an ekphrastic poetry reading at Hillsborough Community College in Ybor and is winnowing poems for his first collection.
