Southern Ice

by Perry L. Powell

Under the magnolia a storm is brewing. The four and twenty blackbirds are holding congress. But so quiet on the surface, what would we suspect? Someone else is always counting out our money.  Nothing different in that. We are running our numbers along new lines these days.  And anyway honey is so sticky on our fingers.  We could not put our three minds on such as that.  Icicles in the south is an irretrievable concept.  Even in the dead of night.  But now it’s morning and the snow falls gently on all our streets. It falls on the streets of the righteous and it falls on the streets of sinners.  It falls and it falls and soon all motion ceases and the quiet is like molasses over all our skins.  I sit at my window and watch the tree.  And when there is but a touch of sun, the blackbirds scatter into the great gray sky.

Brittle Handles

by Perry L. Powell

Reach out and it’s missing. Reach out and all you touch is gritty air. Reach out and there is thick coat ice on all your branches and your work is unavailable.  Your work is unavailable and your power is out.  You have no power to play. And no play to power. When nipple to nipple, where are your warm ones? Reach out to remember. Not owning the world, you cannot fix it. Not fixing the world, you cannot own it. Not the world you own.  Not the fix you’ve blown. Not broken off like a figurine still on the shelf. So once this tree has fallen over your lines, you reach out and what’s to hold? Yet again here you go riding your bike in all directions over black ice.

The Next Golden Gate

Perry L. Powell

This is finally an ending:
resolutions and forgettings on the tv
in your favorite drama.

Thunderclouds arrive like triemes
along the shores of the developed world
while cargoes of overpriced merchandise
sit idly by and junkmen pray for rain.
Who will carry this burden into your future?
Surely not these cubicle philosophers...
Time passes.  The stories only
repeat what we have always envisioned.

See these regrets at dinner.
Pass the salt and shaker of complaints.
I am waiting for a soft landing
on the other side of the mountain.
If you put on your best dress— quickly now—
maybe we can both make the party.

Recipe

by Perry L. Powell

Nature first:
flowers perhaps
but not roses
peonies, lilies, poppies
or maybe a giraffe.

A seasonal reference:
icicles dangling like long fingernails
from oak branches
or the return of geese from the south.

Blend in the people.
For the young, there must be the scent of sex.
For the old, the sag of age.

A philosophical rumination,
some tech, some science…

Stir to taste;
all recipes come down to taste in the end.

Next Day Trips

by Perry L. Powell

It's a meat hook. It's a bat.
From out of the bright orange field emerges a parrot
looking over his shoulder.
Check Google for home runs.
What do you know: gold from quicksilver.
The philosopher's stone in a Japanese University.
Martin Luther at the front door with an iPhone.
Life left in the backroom where the boys play.

Like a charm bracelet—
one anecdote after another
walks the runway.
Here is a late lesson we reject:
gather your tote bag;
Bethlehem waits for its master.

Above and Below

by Perry L. Powell

Above, a plane vanishes
into a cloud. All it leaves
a shadow on cloud flesh.
A breeze skates across the pool;
waves shimmer like mica.

These words are not famous words.
I am not a famous man.
But my wife swims in the blue
waters. And I am content.

A Kind of a Kind

by Perry L. Powell

A thing
is always a kind of a thing
and that’s what makes it
a thing.

As Plato knew.

And so my chair is a kind of chair.

And so you,
leaning over that chair
to kiss my forehead
reminding me of another kiss long ago,
you
are a kind of source of things that are
most warm in my world.

And so I
am a kind of fortunate thing
in this otherwise world.

Again the Beguine

by Perry L. Powell

The rich grow fat on special pleading.
The poor in their gutters beg and cry foul.
The greater community sprawls bleeding
and even Rousseau breaks his social vow.

Wall Street, they say, is just our other street,
though Main Street is where we think we live.
Still those with much suck hardest at the teat
while those with very least are asked to give.

It's one thing and then it is another
when greed is all we really think to value.
We're all on board when upper decks smother,
but do you care when it's the poor we screw?

Does howling crisis always make the king?
Or the king himself construct the crisis?
Again the same players start the same beguine
and again those ancient snakes start to hiss.

Tell your frightened children not to worry--
Madame Defarge remembers how to knit.
Only the fortunate need leave in a hurry
and none are that fortunate, don't we know it?

Steps

by Perry L. Powell

We have forgotten more
than we remember
standing before this sash window
in the haze of an afternoon's
leftovers.

Yesterday's stains remain uncleaned
on an oak floor, in a living room,
dark and irregular like vultures
caged in planks with raw pinned wings
while we avoid what
we avoid today.

A pattern to this, the unspoken
repetition behind
silence and love and body
as though disease
was merely
another way to keep breathing in.

Time is a Trojan Horse

by Perry L. Powell

Burn the midnight cow and beat around the
horn; face over fist for the bait and the bend
over backwards to close early and change
knife hands that beat the complete picture and
dangle a dead cat in front of a house
divided where you eat your own fly by
night in the red and black who knocked the nose
off the grindstone and get your arms around
gang busters (come to a hard stop) firing
on all cylinders while taking one for
the shop and thinking outside the ante.  So

what have you been wiping clean, apprentice?
Pick the low hanging kimonos when at
thirty thousand feet and sell out to the
sharks when the bottom falls out of the bath;
you can scratch my back and sweeten the pot,
but it's all business and no sweat equity
can build a better business at hand for
that eight hundred pound gorilla when he
beats the street to the path to your door, babe.

Touchpoint

 by Perry L. Powell

And but for the sense of this
walking barefooted over acorns on the concrete patio
where shadows keep alibis
chaste as Pompeii.

When now the weather changes,
there are movies in the evenings and conversations
with friends, as is the fashion
on this street.

A baptism in a fish tank
or compressor damage can occur if stacked upside down;
Balak and Balaam over
the horizon.

An unidentified noise heard at night.

The Light of a Thousand Moons

by Perry L. Powell 

I am what I am.

Like you, I have my complaints

and more confusions

than a small skull should hold.

There may be pearls here

but pillars elude me.

This is no age for builders;

they tell me swimmers only need apply.

A doctor and nurse,

sex on the surgical table

in the dim of night...

What can they say to the dying?

Since we are all dying…

I am what I am. 

You are what you are. And there

are peacocks in Wisconsin.

Coda

by Perry L. Powell

Many of us

normal lives

underneath

            strangenesses.

A roof leaks.

An old couple

persists.

This is what

breathing becomes.

In the morning

another reason

on warm sheets.

An eclipse ends.

The moon remains.

Dread or Something

by Perry L. Powell

The false choices or the only choices:

which to choose, which to decline, which to ignore?

Feeling your way along the dark corridors

past the locked doors and the unlocked ones,

you can't escape looking over your shoulder,

can't escape that sense that you are followed,

but by whom, by what, you may never know.

Well perhaps this is a grand adventure,

perhaps a grade-b horror show, perhaps just

another day in a life, you know... Still

what’s a life for? How have we come to be

here in these halls, stumbling along with but

our own misconceptions for a road map―

where these howling dogs are not just for the blind?