Adam Henry Carrière

Flugschriften

Pamphlets

from

Faschingslieder

 

 

Seasons, in Symphonic Form

 

A blanket of January veils our street,

where children shout in tongues

to snowmen, our parent's sex

beneath the sheets, behind locked closets,

in drifts, to be removed the next morning.

 

Zaire heat vapors - the stems of August

your feet pick through, sweet sweat

across the rain forest of my lips.  I love

unmoving dawn haze, Kalahari dreams

of midnight drive-in hard-ons driving

a beater barefoot with a dusty big toe.

 

The color of fallen leaves close our play

ground, peering for burnt cornfields

in a lungful of air.  Through the thicket,

October calls, guiding little ghouls

and goblins to appointed rounds,

under the void of kitchen-warmed bounty.

 

A birthday of blocks of ice and sacks of coal,

the May sojourn of washing the car

as a ruse to hose a friend down,

peeling their wet clothes off

while arguing about baseball and hot dogs

before the late rains interrupt the twilight.

 

 

 

brickwork confusion

 

loose ladies and phony gentlemen,

street urchins, barflies, hustlers -

friends of the revolution

 

in a sea of grammatical pedagogy

the affective domain of collegiate rhetoric

bushed smiles and red-eyed stares reclusively exchanged

 

travel plans laid, down

two, endure the plight of the accidental tourist

a trial, a poor footnote to being laced with one-hitters

shopping for football jerseys, driving to the lonely bus stop

unwashed, ill-fitting backwoods stepchildren truly at home

 

vacuous phone calls ring in the ears

the aroma of thick chicken soup from the homeless mission    

staining the worn jeans

thrown to the elevator floor

            serving the career ladies

            distant, purchaseable heat

            swallowing for fellow tenants

            beer drunk   

            playing pool for switch blades

 

when the composition is payable,

handshakes, smiles, and meek innocence fail                  

even from the street, honor is due

 

in the Armistice Day mists,

twisted wire branches separate the dim gray up above

 

from the flowing reds and oranges,

the clenched hands probing for the other

among the gravel and passing taxis,

drinking and crying in a nerve-wracking silence

before the absent landlord's fireplace

 

stoned                       

running away

machine guns and swords

pictures of rock cities and suburbs,

the agitation of emotion's wilderness

 

pain hidden in the anthology :

            music

            acid

            cordite

            spit

 

muzzling :

            running away from running away 

 

in the spin of an awkward dinner's progress,

hear tell of a deviant lakeside resort town

a transient sleeping in the nearby woods

wanting to volunteer to be a passing camper's toy du jour

 

days

weeks

who can tell?

 

morphine's haze eases the smell of the hot dog stand

            sex and drugs sold to local tourists

            mustard and relish

a summer of oblivion

great storytelling back in the city

 

the elevators and swimming pool might listen

 

 

 

Rhythms of Silver

 

Our hands reach for the other,

feeling hostile grime expend

between our manipulations,

reaching the Virgin's Pass,

one boyish portrait at a time.

 

Reborn, our public gaze waters,

petitioning at the indigo dusk;

Pauite whispers note our arrival.

 

The random leer of the wheel

turned in chaos toward the Bitterroot wind.

Vast time awaits across the Joshua,

out-of-neighborhood, beyond the Sierra.

 

We force ourselves to amend love.

 

Our unseen blending, freely given

to the meadows, intrude upon

stolen Caucasian rhythms like

the shade of a neon sun.

 

Abandoned to this silver,

noisy wager

all-you-can-eat mime

the tumult of no-limits passion

 our runaway eyes stalk the daylight.

 

Meeting further nickel and copper,

our tongues speak of freshly-minted paper.

 

On the tarmac of scalding, treeless compounds,

we began here: free of charge, into rebirth.

 

 

 

The Wreckage of It All

 

Letters spell; dispatches that.

Epistles, you re-open a hundred times.

 

The blue grey sun-up swaddles

the pulp you’d borrowed

burrowed in your cubicle,

following the mottled branches

            of your hand

 

where ball and ink stumble

to keep up with the juniper pangs,

the black currant plumes

persistent in your linen.

 

Were we really so much out of season?

 

Is being twenty years late

a wick cut too short to light

some evil thorn

small enough to hide in a sock

(but big enough to draw blood)

or just the frosty haw of December

that dried the spit ‘round our mouths?

 

We were lovely yet invisible...

 

impossible to tell apart

from the ripples frozen

on the windshield,

a new year occurred inside

our make-believe cool.

 

Nostrils flared,

taking in the flush

the dawn peeled crosswise

above our exchanged hungers:

 

The leafless, bulging paschals

that stank of boys’ sweat,

the deep-planted chrisms

kneeling in the slush.                                                          

 

Elbow to elbow we toweled off

any dewdrops of shame

without knowing

as if we could

the next twenty years

were being wiped away, too.

 

Forsaken time, really, the shamble

of the in-between and the short-lived,

where less dazed, more truthful howling

might’ve undone the fright

that never found a piece of paper.

 

Memorized like all get out

the imagined reconciliations

only seem less cast off.

 

Barefoot in the snow,

I watch falling flakes dot your i’s.

 

Re-reading your belated vows, 

            licking the paper

            in lieu of the younger body

 

I repeat your name, famished

from listening for its wooden strum

inside the vast, oblong winter.

 

 

 

Valentines, cruelly returned for postage

 

The orphan didn’t know how to love,

though the foster child went to the academy,

grew a badge and packed a pistol

to at least pretend.

 

Pairs of twins bookend

adolescence and adulthood,

not up to the snuff of either,

the not enough best you could do.

 

The sop (homo) re: love,

we couldn’t

climb over our faith, and broke

something in the go down.

 

No anyone worth talking about

for whole school years, save

paying & red-lined children;

 

two years at the beach

a face to fall for every season,

but none destined to survive

tripping home;

 

more bunches of not worth talking abouts,

keep your hands offers, names never given.

 

How amazing to write eloquent

wordsmith somethings

not a whit of real experience

a dictionary could pronounce.

 

I’d trade the ink for kisses;

I’d kill a Pope to fall in love 

with a made-up character more real

than these dreary ghosts I keep walking into.

 

 

 

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 (2013) and its sequel, Shant (2017).

 

Flugschriften is excerpted from Carrière's new poetry collection, Faschingslieder, now available in quality paperback exclusively on Amazon.com.