Dreamscape

Dreamscape

A woman alone on a white flat,
delirious, or sleeping.

She proves that mortality
is merely a roof against

the cosmic radiation
of time. In her stance,

tragic or ecstatic,
there are hints

of deliberation. There are
solar tempests

that change her skin
to that waxy patina

with which bronze statues
are coated after restoration.

She might lie there
for a century, a public

monument to thirst,
to the harsh incipience

of indolence or pain,
to the fence

where every lost leash
snarls on its own epitaph.

Colloquy with the Man who Failed the Olympic Trials

What is our will? What is our controversy?
As the steam rises from the dishwasher

and the cabinet drawers yield their harvest
of forks, we split philosophy

with mocha chocolate cake, our toes
keeping their grip on our carbon,

our eyes sore with the haze
from the forest fires. We won’t see

forever towards the disappearing
electrons, won’t understand

the projection of the projection,
the illusion of the imagined,

the splendor of the harvest
of rose hips breaking from orange 

to red, their narrow fruit
crowded with seeds, and all our training

whittled down to a pair of track shoes
specialized and left on the ring

with the signatures of our coaches
and all our most spirited competitors.


Ceasefire

Lobbing the victims
and rocketing the perpetrators.

Under the tunnels,
the old disguises

rear their plaintive
hate. The drones

have been smoked
out, the bus stations

smithereened. No more
sanitary engines,

no more pandemic
examinations. A fatuous

equality between jailer
and the jailed. Everything

boils down to who claims
the fingernails of a god

intent on scratching out
both pairs of eyes, those

of the observant
and those of the observed.


Cartography 1

Now I will draw
a map of all the paradises—

the neat and sportive
mountain ranges

where Christmas invented
the notion of a false dawn.

In my running hand, I bring
the old cedar shingles

to grow the hot fire
in the incinerator,

the one that will engorge
the chimney with such heat

that the cement lining
will crack and crash

to the bottom. My ultimate
happiness is to think

that my ogling produced
the spectacular tumescence

of the one who somehow
wore his manliness

like a caul over his bare
head while he strutted

in his dress greys
more jubilantly

than all the neighborhood
spear-and-swordsmen.

Blasphemies, various and sundry

I gag on the spoiled
nectar of heaven. I slip
on the sour cream

of paradise. There,
in my Ferris wheel
inebriations, I am scratching

the sky where the gods
have lost their sutures
and their eyeteeth.

Every superstition
wins the genuflection
of my conscience

but not the lilt of my ankle
bones. Here, in the fleet-
footed slurry

of the afterlife,
I primp my skepticism
in front of the mirror

that tells which wind
will arrange itself
most fitfully into fists.

Tom Daley

Tom Daley was a clumsy machinist who somehow never lost a digit in twenty-four years in the trade. He now leads writing workshops. His poetry has appeared in North American Review, Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Witness, and elsewhere. FutureCycle Press published his collection of poetry, House You Cannot Reach—Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems.

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