Exoskeleton
What's the point of a heart if it lives to be broken
The dust and the buzzards ensuring a tomb?
Here it's all in extremes
Here the lawnchair's exalted
The respite of fall disappears much too soon.
Once you start looking ‘round, there's just no help for cognizance
The balms of the kudzu and red mud are bare
As the road comes to fork, so the tines are all rusted
And Birkenstock-trodden by those more aware.
Shallow in every glimmer
There's a worn stump of granite
Stubs your toe when you're rushing
Makes you say "oh goddammit
Will you wind or betray more?
Am I here or Salinas?
Face upturned to the steeples
Invalid to hyenas."
Not a song but a scale
Better dead than well-read or thought
And all dirty water dripping from the tap
In its terraced cocoon, every struggling juggernaut
Considers denial of gravity's trap.
Over dew-lapped brigades
The facade of impending light
Is spread like a saccharine tarp or a threat
Still no guard for the flesh
No rebuttal for naked thought
No alum for cloying, invisible wet.
Take the lamp from a lighthouse
And you're left with a silo
Maybe sin is space wasted
If it is, surely I'll go
Where the melting pot's melted
And not clumped in the corner
It can froth all it wants to
It can't get any warmer.
Far from formica souls
Never kneeling at window sills
Or swallowing, fogging up, taking the trees
In this dew-cornered dream
Of a bone that's all outside
A breath is infectious, vicarious, free.
© 1993 John Brocato
The dust and the buzzards ensuring a tomb?
Here it's all in extremes
Here the lawnchair's exalted
The respite of fall disappears much too soon.
Once you start looking ‘round, there's just no help for cognizance
The balms of the kudzu and red mud are bare
As the road comes to fork, so the tines are all rusted
And Birkenstock-trodden by those more aware.
Shallow in every glimmer
There's a worn stump of granite
Stubs your toe when you're rushing
Makes you say "oh goddammit
Will you wind or betray more?
Am I here or Salinas?
Face upturned to the steeples
Invalid to hyenas."
Not a song but a scale
Better dead than well-read or thought
And all dirty water dripping from the tap
In its terraced cocoon, every struggling juggernaut
Considers denial of gravity's trap.
Over dew-lapped brigades
The facade of impending light
Is spread like a saccharine tarp or a threat
Still no guard for the flesh
No rebuttal for naked thought
No alum for cloying, invisible wet.
Take the lamp from a lighthouse
And you're left with a silo
Maybe sin is space wasted
If it is, surely I'll go
Where the melting pot's melted
And not clumped in the corner
It can froth all it wants to
It can't get any warmer.
Far from formica souls
Never kneeling at window sills
Or swallowing, fogging up, taking the trees
In this dew-cornered dream
Of a bone that's all outside
A breath is infectious, vicarious, free.
© 1993 John Brocato