Two opportunistic
S’s
float their soft shapes
among small keels near the shore
dip their baggy serifs
toward the same fish as
hunger
pulls them into twin tildes.
Swallows momentarily
extend them to L’s
until they fluff back out
to optimistic S’s
searching for fish.
Published in ecopoetics, August 2009
I punched you in the sternum
With the great whack of my ghost hand.
I have waited for years to do it,
Put my fist through your heart,
Pick it apart bit by bit.
You knew I would do it
All those premonitions of your death,
you left me detached like that,
In the oven all warm and dead
Like a loaf of brown bread—
Something tells me you enjoyed
The fell ache of my hand on your heart,
Took a thrill from its moment of silence:
Always the adventurer, you are
Finally beaten, the life socked out of you.
O, how I have waited to teach you a thing or two
About deceit. About the way angels mistreat their loved ones.
My murderous hand could not be withdrawn,
So I waited for you in the dark,
Your humanity spent, your exoskeleton worn so thin
I could see where your heart had been
through the shrill thrill of the light pushing through.
Have you caught on yet? Does the bright
White give you a clue?
Our destinies have always been, you
Know, an intertwining of this and that.
O my old love I welcome you back:
A lost handkerchief,
An old shoe found among shadows
Amid the dust where all evil hides.
Out of mind, out of air. Under a stair.
Let me seduce you with my dead hands
Let me sculpt you into your afterlife
Introduce you to Shakespeare and Ovid and Marlowe
Who we both overestimated, borrowed
From far too much. You can stop
running from my death now,
Hold my worn-down ego again. I am
No longer eager to be shaped or mentored:
Just let my light run through your chest,
Feel the pain of the final punch when you realize
you no longer remember to forget while you rest.
Published in Roux, Winter 2005/2006
Music extracts a certain flavor
from the lemon:
a quiet yellow prelude that
runs beside candle light,
or down the bookcase—
a revelation
revealing nothing of sources
or sources of sound.
It harmoniously
pontificates the pastoral and
precludes a jumpiness—
a kinetic crushing
of note upon note,
strain upon strain.
Evolution
snaps rubber-band-like
over the score and
sits down
breathlessly
beating piano chords
to a riff of yellow diatoms.
There was no need to wait
longer
my uncle was in his concrete tomb
buried hours before
he waited too long
not that he would
not capable now of the most simple wish
not the choice of jacket or work shirt
not which pictures of his grandchildren to lie with
not which carnation or rose to smell for eternity.
My ear was mine.
I shopped diligently:
price, skill, selection—
for the right hands to
pierce my ear
while I still had time to enjoy it.
Published in Pearl, Spring/Summer 2004
We talk of death
like some excitable gift
with a Do Not Open Till Kingdom Come
sticker on its wrapper.
Some shadow
left it for us to examine;
we were not told to open it,
we were told only
that it was for us and to cherish it.
We placed it on the table like a conversation piece—
it was Blake’s toy
and Plath gobbled it up.
I ran with it once
under stars that
flickered like heartbeats.
We found it under every pillow,
behind every door.
One October I opened it
thinking of my birthday,
and found only the message:
LIVE.
Published in California Quarterly, June 2001
You wait in cold spring
your fingers dripping
beads of water on your lips
your eyelids the tops of your shoes
a silence overtakes the droplets
a spasm
a crack you step through
you float
you bead your hair and feet
you fall in an explosion of splashes
Published in The Comstock Review, Spring/Summer 2002
I rustle Rimbaud
delicately as pubic hair;
scratching the penis of hell
through his eyes. I am seasonless
as the death of a
flower lingering above a vase;
small, so small
among the vase’s water.
There are no thorns,
no pregnancies;
everything is flat and hollow,
bare to the womb walls—
there is no milk,
no blood,
but there are damp lips and tongues,
small roses, narrow roads,
flat and angleless—
the stupor of drunk and gab,
oh holy,
there is the sound of house-slippers,
the reds of erections and roses.
I lay with Rimbaud under a canopy.
We kiss.
I fall in love with the frailty of apple trees.
Published in Slipstream, August 2000
Rain enlightened by verse
listening
as if
dropped
over
the awning
deliberately
to
the
steps
where imaginary geraniums
pucker
red.
O hopeful monsters
reading
in the library
unrhymed words
mourn for a universe
shaken to its core by
Pound
shifted
precariously
by vulgar wit
so not even the
rain
can
be
enjoyed.
Awarded Honorable Mention in the 2005 Dallas Poets
Community Annual Contest Published in Illya’s Honey.
Unexplained hairy back
drawn with haphazard graphite
a stretched comma
roughed into hooves.
Tough yellow strokes
coughed into a mid-autumn prairie
by hands too naive to have killed anything,
but somehow sophisticated enough to etch a
buffalo
on the back of an expired sheet metal work order
now covered with snorting
charging
over burnt sienna stones
so hot
on the dry grass
the spelling mistake was forgiven.
Published in The Lucid Stone, Fall 2001
The peanuts in the Kung Pao Chicken crawl like beetles.
Even the pan-fried noodles burrow through the sauce like legless lizards.
Bean sprouts graft onto water chestnuts,
form a new species of plant.
Goldfish from the Buddha’s feet swim in and out of the restaurant,
greeting the regulars with orange lips.
Customers ignore the grinning catfish among seared vegetables. He is too precocious.
The Peking Duck complains about the temperature and the mood lighting.
It is too dark to be eaten properly.
Evenings when the food is fresh
prove the best time for fortunes to come true.
Published in Comstock Review, Fall/Winter 2005
Daniel W. Rasmus Poetry 