Wart on the End of a Large Pile by Timothy Essex
“I’m sorry you’re sad,” but you have a condition.
This means: no more can you barefoot it
through public showers, or whisper to babies.
It is like the sickness of April.
The doctor ordered conflicting prescriptions.
Up until now in this golden age
of landscapes,
we have remained as we are
barely.
To call it back requires turning a screw
inside a screw inside a screw.
Let us storm the factory.
We’re not growing up, only fiddling
with the refrigerator knobs. O,
does your nose
have a cold
and where are your lovely disarrayed thoughts
if not stuck in your legs, or your daydreams?
There’s not time for this, but still, and your voice is everywhere
like a river in mourning.
April is all lechery
and the hodgepodges thereof. No wonder, then,
that the cliffs are busy
day in and day out
and little boys hide by the river
throwing rocks into rowboats
until they sink. All that love churns out, it makes churn,
so that no fool would be able, if or when he or she
lept across the warming trickle,
to say, “I feel in the stomach of my heart
a bubble of verb sounds.”
It is before May.
The doctor stuttered, then heaved.
We looked away. It befitted the dryness of the day.
We checked his wallet for a clue.
Nothing. Okay.
I am riven by unforeseen conclusions, and half-believe that I could remain
as such. It is coldest inside.
I spotted you nakedly from one week away.
It was love, of course.
I have walked beneath the lights of the avenue; have eaten
a gnat or two. Since consciousness of sight
I have endured as a man. The ship was in sight
then not, and since then a storm has
bulldozed the reef of your heart’s backyard, a warning from a god
or elsewhere. Now I am so excited about my skirt,
and your arms around my palsied mouth.
Quietly,
it will be like the early years. Give me your ear
or I will acquire it by farce.
Don’t think so?
Make me.
Timothy Essex currently lives in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he commutes to Temple University (where he is studying English & Philosophy), writes poems, and lives life.
This means: no more can you barefoot it
through public showers, or whisper to babies.
It is like the sickness of April.
The doctor ordered conflicting prescriptions.
Up until now in this golden age
of landscapes,
we have remained as we are
barely.
To call it back requires turning a screw
inside a screw inside a screw.
Let us storm the factory.
We’re not growing up, only fiddling
with the refrigerator knobs. O,
does your nose
have a cold
and where are your lovely disarrayed thoughts
if not stuck in your legs, or your daydreams?
There’s not time for this, but still, and your voice is everywhere
like a river in mourning.
April is all lechery
and the hodgepodges thereof. No wonder, then,
that the cliffs are busy
day in and day out
and little boys hide by the river
throwing rocks into rowboats
until they sink. All that love churns out, it makes churn,
so that no fool would be able, if or when he or she
lept across the warming trickle,
to say, “I feel in the stomach of my heart
a bubble of verb sounds.”
It is before May.
The doctor stuttered, then heaved.
We looked away. It befitted the dryness of the day.
We checked his wallet for a clue.
Nothing. Okay.
I am riven by unforeseen conclusions, and half-believe that I could remain
as such. It is coldest inside.
I spotted you nakedly from one week away.
It was love, of course.
I have walked beneath the lights of the avenue; have eaten
a gnat or two. Since consciousness of sight
I have endured as a man. The ship was in sight
then not, and since then a storm has
bulldozed the reef of your heart’s backyard, a warning from a god
or elsewhere. Now I am so excited about my skirt,
and your arms around my palsied mouth.
Quietly,
it will be like the early years. Give me your ear
or I will acquire it by farce.
Don’t think so?
Make me.
Timothy Essex currently lives in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he commutes to Temple University (where he is studying English & Philosophy), writes poems, and lives life.
