poems || John Pursch

Grape Moccasin Surprise


Granted a chortle,
a petulant rambler eased his quiet river
toward grape moccasin surprise,
hoping for quinine and salt acceptance
in sands of umbilical yore.

Graying greenery,
verdant and unrepentant,
gambled incessantly for a few
fraudulent pendants of impending caroms,
wishing frantically for felt taps
and menial shoeshine thunderstorms.

Bolts of pleasant, aerial smothering,
gladdened by the mating of frogs
in the simmering moonlight,
gave tender tappings of shade tools
to sleek, herbivorous wanderers;
all for the frozen coyote's chief demurral.





Fleabag Lotion Motel


Pleas resonate in damp
hallways of mental urns,
helping cordite to ruminate
on spaces of terminal witchcraft.

Gifts of gravel garb the gentle gander
with genders of geese parades,
fluffing a lout's appropriated eyebrows,
clipped and dyed pearl white
for the arctic buttress.

Lips of solid donkey maps
flap for tendencies
under western scanners,
plumping fur chickens
in frosty nadirs
of hobbled bootjacks.

Saints inure us to oozing entities,
grant a spay of erg's locution
to a fleabag lotion motel,
and sleep it off till nether reptiles
evolve into dusty mannequins.




In Seizure's Final Day


In a quenching, erupting frenzy,
a small picket garage helped itself
to essential dumplings of gilded torpor
and branded lumens of cheap table wine,
incipient and dallying for quizzical retorts.

Sparkling inflections saddled
the heavy brigand with salmon feet,
casting out shoes and screening portals
for tawdry row boat salesmen,
piteous in their sad, prudent grazing coats.

Camphor and chestnuts plied soft murmurs
from the meretricious and the damned,
glibly pendulous and receding.

Charcoal clouds, enamoured
with gravy suits and echoing bottles,
filled the skyline's plastic seedbed,
recycling liquid totems
of our fleshy pantaloons,
splendid and proudly recumbent
in seizure's final day.