3 poems || Vernon Frazer

Future Reflections on the Past



Vatic appliance retreads
bluster past the foreign shore
to wake their own nostalgia.


In the waiting, room still applies.
Its motion: encroachment.


Watching the new
bring itself in barrier lifts,
the spirit annulled


its caste of retrofit amnesia,
and scored its threaded ventricles
where the rifts enjambed


their line. Of thought's precursors,
the ambivalent muster threaded


courage, tablets sharing the taste
of the fallen pillars, a memory
calling too soon to be remembered



Keeping What Was When



Caucusing a brittle gradient
tarnished the varnish sealant
before it could grip the irons
bastioning the corridor platelets.
Velcro yearnings dampened
trash compactor metaphors
yawning parietal rift fashions.
Dawn’s shifting splashes lifted
little to stadium displays, brittle
as their stated passions played
out before the cash drawers
tarnished the vocal residue
impeding the offset. The need
to turn around the yearning core
stayed out of traction mists
before looming prefects restored
the shadow lectures, in memory
if not defeat. The pampered feet
walking runways too late shored
the stories unreeling tales of
tampered platitudes, spinning
meaning across tossed entrails
groping for a family montage
at the footing laid before unpaid
burning left the ciphers untracked
and the median entry. Attitudes
centered on lost persuasion caught
the leer’s end mightily focused
on a past montage quickly crashed
after filmic residue lashed the cast
reduction with mirrored defections
to parliaments unknown. Cash-grown
factors splayed the outside totem
entering through receding
bravado tractors tilling the foil
delayed past noon’s return.
Bricolage paired unlikely matches
tipping sulfur to the booming
lectern, a patio reflux pageant
whose messages sent past entering
granule tarnish. No matter how
sweet the plangent, the slipping
tongue lunged faster than its own
rhetoric could spill puling scrawls
across the despairing tables of
spoon-fed wandering. Near the
deflections current ripped pages
from antiquarian nostril settings,
icing the tableau before filler cakes
revived the preceding burn, still
yearning for a pickled radiance.




Following Bravely



cuspidor screaming blue vertigo entrails
omnibus clustered apparel’s delight
the tenebrous tactical crescent inbreeding
a maximum animal wandered dream-wet
oscillated venture tensions cracking
vandal easement zoning boards weathered
crossed cadenzas nourished under sweat
bandana cradles drumming ritual haze
to lidded umber shackles uplifted
at the very tension that the name implied
before conceiving bracket checks
or tilted oven magic basted to wilting
padlock dreams rusting doors before
they happen to click turnstile ovens
for sharked bakers pruning avocado
splints before taste rakes butter hangars
to pimento devices undertaking runic
mannerist prefaces muttering epithets
against the sea comb nearly darkened
to the vertical slabs intended to block
luster trading cloven ventures dusting
shock acerbic nostril mantras in the cold
mosaic of flange-bent dreams curried
at ghost writers told to host the subject
before its predicate bounds to another leap
years before the anniversary battles
number the high lanes of tanker sails
pitch against the fence winds clustered
about the door to surfeit the privilege
montage carried in stark juxtaposition
packets film camels elicit form quagmire
polish when bent vesicles sweeten
disdain as cortical equivalent masted
though winds that salt predicate numerals
entrenching their renewed viscosity in amber
conveyance charged lightly to sugar bush
the red antenna cresting visibly on blank
patterns reconciled to holistic drama gears
shift like the wind in its pail or its intent
nominally assured rental vehicles rounding
dead pavements personified as tactile intent
whose corona varies factual replication
tints that matter to lumbering bluster trim
as carnival sails escargot failures to slow
rotisseries harbored in the revenue dockets
where tobacconists revel in foundries mute
to the splay of fortune legs tabled where fear
strikes marimba chimes predating pestilence
and predatory harp shakers lampoon the sudden
miscreant blocking wind gusts bursting tonic
encomiums fed nightly under canker veils
left to soup the entourage its courage