Two poems by Willie Smith

A NEW WAY OUT 

She rants and she rants at the entrance to a trance. She waits for the craven raven to cease to rave high in the pine – flushed off the corpse by her hurry. 

Then she goes into it – to intuit a new way out.

And in that night, inside that cave, beyond the rot, longer than the hunger, heavier than the lust, she knows me to be, by the nose, she – she bare, she bear, she bang, she male, she yang; she rants, she rants at the entrance to a trance. 

I walk down the street. I feel completely neat. I don’t need to be stirred – I go into it to intuit firefly toes – because I’m already crazy wild bugs, all but sewn into a shroud, lightning bug caught in a web; still sending into the still humid night the remorselessness of gut glow, of chartreuse code, of dash and dot in the riptide blood calling rebels in the hills.

And there is no rebel she never ranted at the entrance to a trance.

I walk down the street. I feel completely neat. I don’t need to be mixed. I feel all meat electrically expressed, kneaded anew from the dough of a lewd mildewed dead dude who is me – howling and raving a new way out.

She rants, she rants at the entrance.    

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SECOND AMPHETAMINE COMING

Shine the teeth. Brush the shoes. Tie laces over tongue. Tote the hyperbolic into the closet. Toe the asymptote. 

Give the baby a death rattle. Barge into the kitchen. Buckle my belt. Leave the house in the care of gravity and the red, the blue, the purple and the one true cross.

Cross the street. Remember I forgot the crosstops. Wheels come off the cart before noon. I get (no time to double back) cross with myself. 

Wallow at the stop. Time oozes. Millisecs slurp millipedes. Step up with the public into transport. Locate a seat beside a disordered borderline babbling into the cell of her menopause. 

Asleep I tumble into the Selectrix. Fastforward to yesteryear. Eating a job before the eighties. IBM constipating a three-letter dream in the midst of my cursing the soup. Never will I have more to sing. Step out into the hall before I even arrive to score the game tied at love speed all. Sins of the past my repast. 

Rub the pate, theorizing how into existence ego eggs to masturbate. The guy with the scythe a bony finger crooks. While I carry for my baby a plague of rattles. 

Awake seconds before my stop. Get off the bus – nun on a priest getting off. Bumble two dysthymic blocks to corporate headquarters.

While security – who gets a script for morbidly obese – scans my card, I heft from his left tabs for my narcoleptic cleft. Wink for the guy to tab the buy. Board the lift to the United Cubicles of my humdrum King Dumb. 

In the sway of the car on the way up snort two crushed. Slip between open-sliding doors. Hustle to the lounge. Swing through half-door. Punch clock. Hit restroom. Lock self in stall. 

Occupy throne. Deploy crystal paraphernalia. Inject just enough paranoia to hop to, of my slop, the top.

     

Exit can. Cruise hall. Enter bullpen. Flash in the mind’s cellar Mammon’s cape. Key my code into the bore of a screen, a tower, a chair, a headset. 

     

Leap on the air. Scripts and patter shoulder maggots mired in corpse grease.

     

I sell rattles to the insane. Cages built of diamondbacks. Stories stacked with confusions of teeth with breath, throat with mouth, apple with atom. 

    

Split-second after the leap, break for beans, already one sale in hyper space. From the topmast crowhop to the deck I must shuffle the instant I funnel back awake into tomb talk. 

     

The queen, the king, the jack – all their numbered faces – yak, grin, sneer, grow near. 

     

I approach like a roach in the hotel of my soul the stall. Reminding myself no emotions are harmed in the making of this out.   

Author bio:

Willie Smith's collection of short stories, NOTHING DOING, can be found at amazon.com.