Bread of Tears Read online



 

  Bread of Tears

  Nathaniel S. Rounds

  Fowlpox Press

  ©MMXI Nathaniel S. Rounds

  All Rights Reserved

  ©Copyright2010

  NathanielS.Rounds

  AllRightsReserved

  Printed by Automatic Train Control

  PublishedbyFowlpoxPrint

  This is an Egg Tooth Imprint

  Contents

  May contain traces of naturally occurring mercury in the form of poetry from other components

  (life is one such example) at less than one part per trillion.

  Living Bird Loose

  1.

  She pushes and thrusts and prods and curses the washtub over scorched

  Living Bird Loose

  Ground

  Blood does indeed mix

  With sweat

  And tears

  She dead reckons

  With a Coyote tail Knotted and ending In a thigh bone

  One good eye

  Searches out fine fruit Bondmaid Dina Voederbiet Of 3663 Sunset Trail

  Circumnavigates from the belly of a cast iron washtub

  Ball-and-claw feet

  Meet wheelbarrow tires The vessel‟s captain is a

  Knock-kneed crabapple dumpling

  Who

  Suffers confinement inside

  Eaton‟s finest figure former corselet

  Feet in waders tread

  Rain water turned to rhubarb punch

  Mossberg 12 gauge Is

  used as a paddle

  Fingernails drip black and white

  Household enamel

  If blows were books

  Dina is a well-read woman

  Where the Schulte farm house used to stand

  2.

  An old Chrysler combination ambulance and hearse

  Gathers dust and rust and seats on very quiet driver

  Named

  Billy "Slobber Box" Schulte

  He was the only man in Cumberland County

  To have made a million- and- a- half dollars selling blueberries

  And still wear the same pair of coveralls

  Mighty 100-proof Oedipus complex clogged the cornmeal mash

  Between his ears

  Billy defiled the rakers Dina included

  Hoarded junk cars

  Buried cats alive

  His own fate was sealed

  With a bag and a twist tie

  3.

  Dina‟s glass eye keeps vigil

  Over the Chrysler Mausoleum

  She has burned, burned

  And burned these fields again and again

  Fifty-nine acres of low bush blueberries

  Minus the inventory

  But Dina can still see them

  Sometimes painted black like a cloud-covered

  Sky at midnight

  Sometimes a foggy blue-gray

  Or a solid blue like her baby‟s cotton blanket

  She stops her vessel when she spies some untouched berries

  These ripe ones defy season‟s passing

  She drops her 12 gauge in the tub and gets out to investigate

  The berries pass from her hand to a small baby rattle and driftwood marker

  A stone‟s throw from Billy

  The marker has the name "Blue Boy" on it

  And some plastic lace and a glass eye

  A blackbird settles on a nearby branch

  It warbles pook-pook-pook

  And flits off with the north wind

  Mind Your Martyrs

  1.

  In a coffee lineup at end time‟s end

  I was cultivating small talk with A half-baked potato in a ball cap Coughing up chestnuts like

  "Corners are holding cells for cowards" And

  "Baskets are prisons with softer bars" Then it was back to the coach‟s board To set up the game just so

  Knocking urban legends and

  Papistical idolatries

  Into the goalie‟s net

  I had dissuaded the man from overeating

  Until a spirit of sickness overtook him

  And his intestines spilled out at his pant legs

  There was little that could be done And so I took his last cup of coffee And drank it

  2.

  On a moonlit mission frightful I

  Sent a message via Photophone slide trombone

  All about the land mass falling into tinted water

  World‟s last otter sobbed over gobs of provolone

  Balinese banana leaf daybed soaked up sadness in the night

  Mass hysteria was dumped into the punch bowl

  Man and his dog were wound up tight

  By the half-commission hatful (sigh)

  Sodden gunner cannon balled into a shrieking secretarial pool

  And I could only watch and paddle watch and paddle

  Cling onto logs and small children A catfish surfed the flood waters Swept its way to the top

  Of my head

  Marked its territory

  I didn‟t mind getting vitamin D the hard way

  But could kill for a bucket of vinegar

  And some beer-battered beer

  I bottled my whine and swallowed

  My last Vicodin

  Dreaming of sunshine and free

  Therapy

  Uncapped and Sleeping

  Tooth by tooth We are all dying

  One by one they abdicate their thrones

  Leave their bitter dust in apples and scones

  Fangless truth is tempered by the shock of pink

  In a dull pit

  Lit by light unmarred, unmoved

  We sink into our graves

  Reproved

  The Garbage Tree

  And the world is an upturned tree

  Of repurposed copper coil and aluminum

  Welded but stretching out

  From rusted dump truck hood

  Angled and covering

  Springs suspended above mud-caked piano

  Utterly decomposed and yet

  Still playable for the incorrigible

  Your Albino Aquatic Frogs Are In

  Or

  One Plague in Four Voices