DM
153
Adam Henry Carrière
Flugschriften
Pamphlets
from
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.