Midnight sings
Midnight stings
Midnight stings like a remembered slap

Four red skin-streaks
as bright as cut fruit or silence,
Bolder than hot coal, more present than now.

I adore midnight
in untroubled solitude
in uproar and tremor
aftermaths dulled and forgotten.

All troubles come here to be magnified and shorn
an ever-hurtling pit stop
subtle and cryptic
like the silencing of a many-belled cacophony.

My history stops here to writhe and stumble, and eventually
is blunted to a damp hiss, and numbly tomorrows.

Three men walk into a bar, ordinary men, all of them liars,
unexceptional in most ways, like most men. They are not together,
but one of them wonders why he sits alone. He peoplewatches,

hearing only the laughter that comes from the strong bonds of friendship,
breathing the silent intimacy of lifelong couples,
and regurgitating the excitement of casual ones.

Three men walk into a bar, and they pull up stools before the taps.
The only sign of the end of the day’s work is the dirt
that one of them cleans from under his fingernails with the edge of his newspaper.

Dirty martini, dry, easy on the vermouth, straight up with three olives and lemon peel, beer, whiskey on the rocks.
One wanted a daiquiri, but men who sit alone must not drink what the bartender’s wife would drink.
The headlines of the newspaper with the frayed edge are the same
as the ones in yesterday’s. The crossword puzzle is a quarter completed.

Three men sit at the bar, none of them directly next to the other.
One on the long end of the L, the others separated by two empty seats.
The music is familiar in a way that only pleases those who are sitting accompanied.

One reads every advertisement and plaque and poster on the walls,
studying the straight corners and brightly-colored paint of the pictured pubs in Ireland,
and his elongated reflection on the metal taps.
One watches the game, for which he already knows the score, on the television without sound.
One orders a second drink because he doesn’t know where to go after finishing his first.

Three men walk into a bar and wait.
One leaves before the other is ready to adapt to this change in his surroundings.
He regrets ordering another drink and finishes it quickly, and then he leaves too.

The third reads at the bar, hoping someone will take interest and ask him what he is reading.
He occasionally looks up at people who walk by, and those ordering at the bar, hoping to catch someone’s eye.
He talks on his phone with his wife, reminded that he must water the plants and trim the lawn.

Three men walk into a bar, then return to their lies of lives after their lie of a break.
They all put their wallets, change, cigarettes and lighters on top of their wardrobes,
hang their coats and hopes in their closets,
and cover themselves with blankets, protecting themselves from the cold of winter.

I am supercharged.
I can’t find a better reason to get ready to go.

I am solid as an iron cast,
as fragile as the melted mass.

I see candles and bright lights,
sugar cubes and liquor bottles.

I see fortifications and assets,
tribulations and trinkets.

I see ones and sixes,
risks and fears and luck.

I can’t spend all of my money on tonics right now,
when I want the anesthetics worth buying.

I am speaking jibberish.
It is a sin to incite the first wrong.

But all I do is fumble for the lightswitch,
and then grow tired of passing the next hurdle.
I have thumb-tacked my armoire against the wall.

Mocking irony, to have made mention of Ireland
in a condition that regards the Addressed,
Who, though not blind, unable to see
Another journey not meant to shine more brightly
With effort and sacrifice,
And whose reluctant absence from
England’s last winter,
fondness and severance recalled, but like an open text;
Admitted plurality
Into California’s spring.
Let your Bard praise
the star of hope left him;
In my dealing,
responsibility inhabits
The place of convergence.
The instrument, however—
Threatening danger, with sovereign power over its subject;
With its craft,
Meditation fathering advantage,
Conceals and reveals
Wherever it pleases to select
In its written exchange,
From chaos, takes grotesque form
Of a thing like confession,
Naming,
Sentencing its guilty author
to the consequence of its own use
with its self-birth on the page.

I have taken five pairs out of the six that Drew provided to make a five-line stanza, omitting a sixth pair of words. I have added a new condition to the collab, which is that it be a rhyming poem. I have added six more pairs of words from which the next person should choose five, and add the next five-line stanza. After you finish, add six more pairs of words for the next stanza, and add another condition for the poem. Let’s see where it goes.

Nindoodem, my totem, was not evidence enough.
An owl in midday should be made of sterner stuff.
If I rapture, repossess the day, like ale held in a cask,
If I return as one reincarnate, given that I was designated to bask,
I would be too stale to be hungry, yet too curious to dismiss,

fare late
creation feel
stir rosemary
no sixes
abolish rate
ministry almost

I’m not in a position to fly to you
So I will just conjure your nectar here
It used to be different, it used to be that everywhere someone was missing or was missed
Now it doesn’t matter, there is so much that we can throw away

In the midst of it, in the heat of it,
We might say whatever we want, we might mean whatever we say
We might bring our calls to the loom and make some extra cash on the side

I won’t belittle what you’ve built up,
But I will point out the truth to you whenever it reveals itself to me
I will pick out the freshest of the fruits, the least bruised peaches and plums

I am extending my hand from within this circumference of turmoil,
Penetrating its edges
I am asking you whether you follow this dialectic
I am discarding the skin, chewing through the meat and exposing the pit of your ideology

The most important thing in the world
is right in front of our spyglass eyes,
blocking the rest of the world
until it is bumped out of the way
by the most important thing in the world,
which blocks the rest of the world
until it is replaced by
the most important thing in the world,
which is dissolved by the most important thing in the world

And as we are slowed down by our hurry,
we trip over pebbles and fall hard.
Going on day by day,
It’s not going to be like last summer this year;
another Sabbath passed without a sound,
There’s no need to watch people die.

I can make waste by drinking from your poisoned barrel,
or I can build cities from the mud up—
the most important thing is that the river keep moving
because when it stagnates the parasites eat us away
They chew until our bases are exposed
until exhaustion, until the margin of ruin,
until we can’t bear to run another lap around why

So we ride this vehicle toward the resolution we have conjured,
which, to be honest, is all we can do.
And since we are avid, let us feed off the trimmings
in hopes that we will be replete,
and nothing more.

To Dan Quayle, Oscar De La Hoya, Alice Cooper, George Romero, Rosa Parks, Charles Lindbergh, Clyde Tombaugh, and this guy.

Orderly and august, the quislings gather their pickets and banners.
The time-honored blockade is ritually de-wired.

The bullets don’t care, the suits don’t care,
the governments don’t care, the viruses don’t care
And they are it and we are it and this is it and that is that.

Not much unlike the Georgians,
they had not reached a talking point.

They threw clay jugs through glass ceilings
that protruded from the alleyway

Their senseless arts were like mad libels,
monkeying around while carrying a blowtorch.

They were not anesthetized,
Though there was something quite trodden
About the miniscule reason vanquished by their ancestors

They didn’t quite hammer out
that which was in store
but what they did know they could not see
for fierce winds blew down the alleyway

They jutted out face-first
Before lending themselves a spare moment to do as they pleased

It didn’t matter what they came for,
It was just the audience
for whom they paraded their nothings and their scorecards

And here we still are, suggesting that we might stop them.
And here we still are, donkeys pulling wheels.

The following was at one point the beginning of the poem I posted as “Seventeen galaxies ago there was a meteor-strike,” but then I did some cutting:

This sweet Hippocrene pouring forth atop Mount Helicon
reduces and sharpens,
agrees us in this hollow trough.
We speak closer on this plane that meets us,
unifying irony, anguish, delights, and unspoken, purple-mouthed truth.

Following smiles will be knowing;
Here we are in the tubes worth knowing;
Beneath the salted snow in the vast empire,
Gatherings of milk-skins are set before the tables.

If it doesn’t strike us, it soon will,
And we are petering, teetering forward
Unto the great white depth
Ever before, with great spidered ironies

Like a rock-solid mold we want to run like the cheetah;
We once withheld this plot,
But now, now straightforward,
The never-ending piecemeal,

We can feel free to go unchallenged,
Marked smarted by those who know.

We find dilapidated mineshafts
And squeeze tunnels through where they wouldn’t be meant to meander;

______

Now I have this, which seemed to want to follow the above:

We’ve got cherries and bunting,
Bunt cake for the ride;
I haven’t made certain what the time will be,
But we can feel electricity shock through us
Like electric needles piercing our veins
We elapse forward and scurry back.

Nine times out of ten
We have a candle illuminating it for us
Yet we lag behind,
Adventuring ever forward as though we knew naught.

I don’t know how to hurry out of here,
But if there was a pleasant theme tune I would hum it;
As we carry on
Baskets and scenery
Heralds and clauses

Fairly missing in the sadscape
Hurtling before us like a rocket disaster
Deadbolt nine millimeter

We call it the coming and going,
The talking from east and west,
The nonchalant city brights
Ashen to our call;
It started with him and we have this world
We can’t come to a conclusion
We shall come to it at another time.

______

Does it work? Or better to re-arrange the first part with “Seventeen galaxies ago there was a meteor-strike?” Or…? Suggestions/re-arrangements/re-mixes encouraged.