Four poems by Wesley Teal

Four poems
by Wesley Teal

Fairfield Transcendental

My mind was shaken
like a Bond martini
served in San Francisco
circa
oh-six of nineteen,
two years and ten days before
our dear Mr. Ian Fleming was born.

So I swerved unnerved
through the tangle of curves
(mental and motional)
while the notion of the road
kept me rolling on and on
until I hit Fairfield at fifty-five
on spinning wheels
circling
and stopping at last,
out of gas,
to fill up at a Phillip's downtown
where I found salvation
in the conversation
of a fresh faced station attendant,
the sound of her voice more soothing
than all the meditations of the Maharishi.

=====================

Suburbia Death Poem

I will subdivide my heart
into (sub)urban impulses of loss and longing,
beating out blood fire engine red
strewn across brand new parking lots
into the alleys of America.
I will not keep up with the Jones
when the greens of spring always give way to this,
to every moment a wasteland
wrapped up in ribbons of death,
dotted with immaculate houses built
with the bones
of an endless genocide.

---------------------

To Jaimie

someday, perhaps, we will accept
the way the lines of our thoughts
lead all too often into an abyss
that, perhaps,
God meant for us to be as we are,
intricately carving the crooked paths
in our minds,
each one delicate and potent as an egg,
that, perhaps,
it was the world that made us this way
our minds emulating clearcut forests,
children born in war-torn villages,
the melting of ice in the spring,
that, perhaps,
the whys do not matter so much
because we are
and will continue to be.

********************

Death of an Abolition Town

This city's soul is dying(, I know.)
I can feel it breathing
in gasps and shudders.
(Every breath it breathes sounds
like the next to last it will utter.)
These roads are cracking under the strain
of moving ever outward,
ever outward,
(and away from the heart of
this soul's still barely beating rhythm.)
The faces of strangers seem faceless
(formal representations
of this strange disease:
a silent cancer spreading
across the soul of this city.)
We are left helpless, lost children of
a lost generation,
intertwined in the
ugly decline of a long
forgotten miracle and the‭
shuddering breath of a shuddering soul.
(Salvation, carry us closer to home.)

Author bio:

Wesley Teal currently lives near Burlington, IA. His poems have been published in deep cleveland junkmail oracle, remark., Raving Dove, Get Underground, and 24th street irregular press' Poems-for-All Series.