3 poems || John Pursch

Decoupage

Car doors slam

to interludes of

interjected heroines

the rabid self-majority

of wayward waybill

carriers culled

egocentrically

from nightfall’s lost

impending rhythm

of vast neglectful

undertones

in sepia

and solid gold

conundrums.

Crash Couch Limestone

“All a stoolie-slighted mainspring

could ever hope to aspire to

is a wooden galleon hatch

of emerald falsetto plumes,

lifted deftly from any pestilential caravan

of slubbed silk martyrs in subway mirth,

caprice beneath intended shame.”

This, of Corsican mealtime blush,

was uttered by a mixed and tattered

soldier of farcically stunned perennial

loaf-pinching gazetteers,

who trolls the skinny contrail set

for stewardess contestant meat

in pilfered contagion stew

on steamboat amplitudes

of heretofore unfounded

socket news and duly breaded

mace facts, pinned arms,

and cored retaliation blobs.

Time stores sold their ivory wares

in collocated colander sauce,

flipping cylindrical salamanders

in beveled devil’s fountain flange cake,

served hypothetically

to chunky waitress fodder

in simian crash couch limestone.

A Locomotive Sneer

In fonts of cabbie wisdom spewn

to backseat listening devices

masquerading as human fare,

how flecked with sweat

the horse’s flanks are.

Teetering junkies rule the cities

with uncrossed eyes and dappled tees

and smoldering indoor campfires

and turbid lupine vestiges

of brawny anterior shame.

How roped and tied to

feathered bowel constriction

the hopelessly oppressed

symbolic mastiff is!

The stovepipe heresy

of postal mad hattery

appears to overtake

all historical enterprise

in the quicksand broth

of a locomotive sneer.