An Old Fashioned

The news turned him to stone, I guess. 
Who ran into a Bush,
then heard the gong of the Fuehrer Bell
among the multiphasic  tones of his empty room.
Much nonsense makes its own sense, they said.
One line at a time, or sometimes less.
Though so often what comes is a response to circumstance
a shoe thrown in anger, or a blue pomade
slabbed brightly to the nape 

Of one who begs you to dream of her in her beauty and your need.
**


In the Brigade for the Repression of Banditry 

The diamonds glowed like water

in the eyes of the desired.

“Bonjour,” she muttered as he walked by,

in a tone not unlike the tonsured apes

on the Hill

whose blue fedoras shape the wind

while humbly doffed by their great white knuckles

bending low 

in respect for him

whose bread is their meat

and the drink of our need.


**


In the winter
of ambivalence
the tides shone upwards
from the sand’s blue oar.
He mistook the water for the shore

and walked 

into the rain, as if to disappear.



And heard the dead gurgle

under flarffy white clouds


that“attempt to attain the status of science
 which . . deals with the subjective by excluding it” 

**

The black currents were thick on the pie.
Oh my, she said as she winced, then sighed,
As the missiles streaked across the plains,
then tumbled off course, 
like cigarettes tossed from a passing parade.

**
“Bitters, sugar and orange,” he said.

“There’s a new pogrom on channel 3.”
 
 

 

— David Hickman