Adam Henry Carrière

Rhododendrons

 

 

Comboland

 

"I wanna go the rodeo,"

skin-and-bones with the buzz cut said

 

over the rustle of his sighing bags

of denim, lowering to the sawdust

 

and the popcorn-stained t-shirts

upholstering pierced nipples

 

in the low tax bracket of rented love

and vermillion sands,

 

like saliva entering the young

body's old life in dollar-shaped drops.

 

 

 

Symbolism

 

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired

by madness and written by reason.

                Andre Gide

 

Illumination, emptying into the spirits

beside the ruddy moon,

hiding in ancestors.

 

High school yearbooks echo

pulp and stone

prayer cards written in radiance,

tongues other than Rome's.

 

Quiet's murmur

rumble and clatter

of the wind's sartorial dusk

 

Mozart sweetens the blood I sip like wine

inexpressibly unaccompanied. No soft lighting

hides such unimportance.

 

The only symbol left is pulpy ink

I sleep, heedless and uncovered,

within.

 

 

 

Amiss

 

I woke up and fell out of bed,

about to touch a mother’s son

I hadn't seen in any adulthood:

 

This life-like dream, when I laid

a hand on his unspoken elation;

the rainy sundown we slept in,

where I underwent his breathing

in a union-labeled city

concentrating in the same Catholic

camp.

 

Foolish twosome, wisely knowing

 

unruly hush-hush

minds ne’er straightened

Boy Scout whispers

and Marine sobs

 

more truthful lies on the subject

puberty’s under-the-sheets tattle.

 

By God's amused grace

some videotaped evidence exists

that the two of us met at all.

 

Watching it heart-broke my delirium

while a cold search engine spits out

a handful of lines, drained

our once upon the other.

 

Occasions in later lonesomes can't skew that.

 

 

 

Clemency

 

The over-rating of orgasm

has become a national sport

unreported by battalions

of chattering magpies,

whose tenured myopia

feeds the prerogatives of egos

too spongy to finger.

 

The thought thieves

neither sweat nor groan

when their pallid thighs

open and mistake complacent

satisfaction with quality sodomy,

 

when warm fluids teach an uncorrupted mind

how to swallow, and a good lay passes

with much notation for clemency.

 

 

 

Seeing Fables in the Ceiling Fan

 

The last moon smiled

in paternal crescents, unstirred

by wind neither fields nor stock miss.

 

Up and down, walking

between dreams, orange streetlights

setting the closed curtains aglow,

 

the bareness of the other

side of your bed tip-toeing

through a night gone astray

by time’s womb-weary whim.

 

 

...from Rhododendrons of the Sea

available in quality paperback exclusively on Amazon.com

from Hammer & Anvil Books

 

Adam Henry Carrière is an online habitué specializing in letters, publishing design, and instruction. A former NPR broadcaster, he holds a BA in Film & Video from Columbia College and an MA in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. He has taught writing at both his alma mater and for the United States Navy across the Pacific. Born on the South Side of Chicago, Adam resides in Las Vegas, where he has won the Nevada Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry. He styles as Verleger / Herausgeber of Danse Macabre, Nevada’s first online literary magazine, and DM du Jour, its daily gazette. He is the author of Miles, its sequel Shant, and the poetry collections Faschingslieder and Rhododendrons of the Sea.