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The Undertakers of the Dead by Unseen Hands(Young Poet at the Bus Stop with Some new Vinyl in his Hand)


by Darryl Price


"The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.'--Nadine Gordimer
 
Other things do matter just as much of course. Of course they do. Hey I'm still kind of alive inside this poem here. At least I'd like to think
so, so yes another part of me should have known the many proper names 
for all these everyday anti-factuals. I've got nothing on you, brothers. As to
the why; well for me there's always been a big toothy bite out
of something strange and wonderful lurking inside the gut ,or maybe looking is
the better word, just outside the frame of this so-called
life like a ship's boarding plank gently clapping up and
down in my brain of brains, I seem to be able to
sense only when I'm not being so silly as to
think I might actually have something original to sing to the world, to all of
you that is. And then I have to choke down all
 
those deceptively sleeked back sensuously perfected works of the others still also
alive and kicking around poets smoking their careful lives among us and I am sorely smacked up like
a paper jack thrown up against everything that exists, the cartwheeling
laughing bricks, then the awful crying daytime hours of the modern golden age, the easily broken into sky banking
stars, the sticky dripping egg whitened cloudy rivers of yore, the crawling on hands
and knees line of trees, the blurring of those same stately tree houses with the sped-up antic traffic tropes on top of the crazed and crazier upside down rows of familiar
sidewalks, the yellow smeared make-up of worn out car hoods, with their whistling down windows, the troubled young winds of now with
their beery speaking morning breaths, the skating around the pond like Snoopy with his eyes closed in some kind of personal bliss heavily huffing airplanes, the muffling of butterflies growing en
mass, the rolling down a hill without any brakes grinding to the floorboards doorways, the 
falling out of windows windows, the newly ashen smells, oh well,
just about anything you see will do the new trick or treat for sweet snacks, just buffeted back
 
and forth like a spongy sort of fleshy pinball, until
I think I'm going to surely faint, or maybe stop the latest madness
right there in my little ignoramus tracks and fall down
sound asleep like a little baby worm. I don't know which
it is. I mean how do they do it? Speak it
ever so slowly, so carefully picking out which immaculately groomed
flowers to point out to you next, and then stepping quietly
backwards in their oh so finely-turned out  gentlemen's clothes and
letting you go on ahead to admire things from your
own safely chosen childish distance, your own freedom's comfortable as a
big fat overstuffed blue chair perspectives? How? I don't get it. Maybe
 
I'm tripping way too much on this particular bass riff of emotions, man. But they make it all 
sound so terribly easy to get to the painted pretty parts. I want to do
that easy of a dance across the moonscape for you. Yet I struggle from the first word on like
some kind of single-minded kid putting together a toy train track from an
old cardboard box found in a crummy basement somewhere, labelled,
"missing some parts." Just chew on them beaten up paper words for a while, son, and let
them trickle around and around within your slippery tongue's hot cave for
another small while and... And what? Their ready for prime time made words roll out
like already made for radio hit-songs. Like chocolate devil's food 
cupcakes on an assembly line, for God's sake. Like little magnetized fuzzy bees humming a mobilized happy
flower hopping singalong inside your campfire's crispy brain. Like. It's no use. None at all, dudes.
 
Darryl Price  042310

 
The Sky Here's Full Stopped
 
under a blanket of
blue snow. That's my
reality. But even if
one of those thread-like
 
clouds throws its swallowed
light after you I
suppose I'd be happy.
I want your footsteps
illumined on the path.
 
And if one wild
wind might detach itself
from today's army to
gently brush back the
hair from your cheeks,
 
well, you know, I
think maybe what's left
of all the free
floating leaves in the
world could not possibly mind.

Darryl Price


A Prisoner Refuses to Eat
 
They have placed a
gun on every table.
I don't want to
kill you for supper.
 
They have thrown a
net around every tree.
I don't want a
sky made to order.
 
They have stolen a
child from every heart.
I do not believe
in this long mirror.
 
They've become us when
it suits their purpose.
I do not want
to answer that calling.
 
What I want is
not anything that's made
but  looks a lot
like your smiling eyes.
 
It is in fact
most like your laughing
voice or the yellow
sun blown across daisies.

Darryl Price

 


       
 




 
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