Adam Henry Carrière

Fünf Gedichte aus Faschingslieder

 

 

Seasons, in Symphonic Form

 

A blanket of January veils our street,

where children shout in tongues

to snowmen and parents’ sex hides

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 crotch. 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.

 

 

 

Slumber Party

 

The air-conditioner dribbled icicles

from the upholstered cell, climatized

racket drowning out babycakes drama

of thick secrets and desires roasting

in the shared ruse of the velvet quilt.

 

Outstanding summer nights

cool their heels in the faint.

Demented hosts know how to hold

a parade; smiles, songs, and bags

of tricks float down the bedded street,

 

greeting marginal guests, lovelorn

losers, pretending to make it

out on the used balcony. A steady

supply of meaningless others

make for a unique mattress atmosphere.

 

Hot, sticky pizza is dinner-chewed

apart with gusto, unprotected

beer applied orally, puppy love

pot-sucked dry, Acapulco Gold

in the glow of late-night British horror films.

 

Surrender to TV is a real man's meal.

Watching each other sleep is the best

entertainment. Lost t-shirts, abandoned

socks, forgotten pajamas, stolen

underwear all observe from the carpet.

 

Hallucinations of stripped dreams

pine just under the surface

of baby picture stupidity

where bare asses are spanked

and red flesh lands on wet fingers.

 

Early Beethoven accompanies deep,

fully-clothed sleep meant to lose

each other’s coyness in. What stories

your bodies could write! Laughing

whispers, trembling hush-hush,

 

timid brushes with bothersome heat.

No one comes, with their own

hand or anywhere else.

Only being so nearby mattered,

approximating each other together,

 

kindness in short breaths

almost heard under the pillows,

gulps of air no one owns

to faraway mothers in the backdrop 

before, during, or after.

 

 

 

Beke

Decendants of original white settlers in French Martinique

 

I am a Beke,

one of the ruling minority,

descendant of a lost Czardas literature,

the dynastic seed of colorful neighborhood decay.

 

My bullwhip is my tongue,

splitting bloody backsides with war words;

my bayonet is my pen, held at the ready,

and my dreams are loaded pistols carried close.

 

The waste-laid plantation

no longer produces product,

the sweet cane bittered,

the sour fruit withered.

 

All we pick and attempt to market is stupidity

cleverly worded,

Zeppelin ego and wormwood citizenry,

air inflated with spent and empty time.

 

My fresh slaves buck and bridle at my classical malignity,

their peeve a thin vinagrette,

but no one intelligent watches, no one important cares,

not least of all the smiling and singing new arrivals.

 

 

 

Soul March Archive

 

The lonely same old lonely

my cold solo inventory

my moon and star audit

 

yes, another awful annum

trod under the jackboot draught

of the Prussian wind

 

there are few stars, and they're without light

I'm punch drunk in the haze,

hearing cars I can't see and no one can catch

 

the last little home forest,

quieter for the spectating cattle

but more violent for desert rats

 

six minutes to go to no party

no friend, no lay, no way

no invitation and none on tv

 

where are the old black & white comedies?

Marx morphine, Laurel & Hardy heroin

Abbott & Costello alcohol

 

desert years, invisible books,

cryptographed for the ages

broke and out, gambled to sleep

 

each gasping night a dreamy gloom,

each baking day a sunless denial

in the never-never land of Odds.

 

The same old lonely, this cold solo inventory

my nickel-poisoned neon inventory

my cold solo inventory

 

a moody wind swallows the garden chimes

in an invisible, glassy wave

stolen from a scene in a dollar movie

 

Boom!  I hear the voice of fireworks

honk honk music to the far south

and heaven's sing song in the big north

 

my lie of history, my eastern essence -

innumerable stars trapped inside of

my glasses, gazing ever westward

 

interrupted fanfare for the big garçon

a symphonic ballet of unimaginable pomp

from a family-like friend who took poison.

 

Destinies of gilded, narcotic shores

the warm warning somebody's time is coming

there, in the dreadful apparat

 

can you see, near the bright

southern star, behind the incomplete

moon, it allows the ink to follow

 

the words to follow the soul rhythms,

the bittersweet shine of coffin armor

and unfortunate faith in thoughtless desire.

 

Snap!  The grand waltz repeats over and repeats over;

it began this symphony, this high desert adagio,

this, my dust-ridden opus escape.

 

This vengeance is troubled,

a stronghold on a coastal wasteland

a place to miss sooner rememberings

 

first heard to fading Red mandolins,

now paved over an indelible ocean,

a dining memory served on skeletal bone china,

 

with perjurious glassware, poisoned vodka,

sexual caviar, and a Cartier showroom's worth

of diamond tears turned down in marble beddings.

 

The dream is only the life yet to lead,

what goes in the Daily Planner 'To Do' column:

hallucinations of chimeras and phantasms

 

circuses and animals, the big top big time big win

big big big, big enough to leave the diminutive,

them and their heaving, humdrum lives.

 

I want erotic revenge on the graveyard

in only the best clinical sense, to connive

Pan-Slavic hatred with cavorting soldiers,

 

uncut and hung boys with onion-seasoned smoker's breath,

to whistle Orthodox chants at funerals for Jewry

retaliating for unanswered letters and unreturned affection

 

to beat a fistful of matted curls onto the gory bricks

of my broken heart's Babi Yar, basking

in cathedral superiority over their temple-bound frailty.

 

The stucco walls loom large in the flickering moonbeam,

ornaments on the bare branches of my memorials

outside the unwanted warmth of a nearly empty house

 

a nest, a collection of collections,

pictures, guns, and nutcrackers

protective music and proud buddy animals

 

their love unconditional in a world of cold

solo inventories, unlistened-to symphonies

playing under the new year star and moon

 

winter chords played by wind-swept strings,

woodwinds piped by remarkably well-preserved corpses,

commemorating the death of an evil father

 

a sire of steel and fire,

whose concertgoers now long for the mailed fist

in their national slavery, these woe, holy people

 

asunder, laughed at by the squat, silent one

through giggly movie magic;

what a finger to such a fiend.

 

These concertgoers are my brothers

in the same old same old lonely

somewhere in that black, elegiac subsistence,

 

this snarling, satirical nerve in my heart,

they are all there in euphonious reprisal

gunning down the unwashed

 

dressing up the homeless for execution;

footlights at dawn and headlines at noon,

meticulously chronicled for the best-seller grosses,

 

before closing in the somber night to bad reviews

and niggardly barbs.  Like stinging people,

the silent words are hard to forget

 

every letter a chilled limb,

every sentence a tightened lip.

You deserve names that don't rise from the grave

 

faces that stay under the dirt

and coffins that stack neatly inside the closet

crypts of accumulated, just remembrance.

 

Go, before someone drops a symphony on you

there'll be no inventory of faces tonight

they are gone in the starless dark quilting

 

keeping my nakedness in drizzly swathe.

Soon, my house will win the flower of its glory

our jubilation will march the sunlight into beaten dark

 

pictures of guardians and warriors

under the grey eye of the dead,

thrill-watching this wild blond wolf

 

with glinting teeth and a gleaming sword

massacring a blood red victory for the family,

murderers all, to cheering and wine-belching screams.

 

These skinless hands on exterminated ivory

this aphorism, shivering with the nervous doom of tension

my circus march elephant polka dissonance,

 

my cold new year nightfall, my winter

darkness wind, my surreal conversation

compulsion with unwanted, echoing intruders

 

I surrender to the cold

and refuse no inventory

there is no cold solo same old same old lonely

 

the only thing left is an empty Vienna,

bassinet of dream waltzes,

and an unendurably faraway Paris,

 

bed and breakfast of dark lights

these waltzes and lights,

they are less so solo with you in my hand,

 

in my body, in my heart

cross at my cold solo heart and hope to die

in an all-new lonely, lonely, only with you.

 

 

 

reverie-memoir

 

The silence at midnight abounds,

lost in the puddled glow of a crooked

lamplight and the blackened draft.

The windows are pulled wide,

as if to receive restless wraiths

with cakes and cider, but no calls

become one, no portraits go barefoot

down halls deep in sleep.

Not far, the demented toss and turn,

the abandoned bleakly stare into their own

abyss, the broken wait for their next feeding.

Their stillness knows no peace.

Invisible figures move to and fro

between the sealed glass and the wet lawns

unknowing the law has set so many wrecks

into such a tidy menagerie. They’d weep

to feel a single moment of its internment,

so instead they flee, to gluttony, to insensibility,

to citizenship the books can be proud of.

But in those leather-bound folios,

a banal malevolence awaits - at the tip

of a syringe, the taste of a pill, the drop

of a hat, to terrified whispers and off-hand

feints that disturb the intelligent design

of such silence. The dawn is only a rumour,

any god, a distant memory to these fatalities.

 

 

 

Adam Henry Carrière is an online habitué (it’s easier than hanging out in saloons) specializing in letters, publishing design, and, God’s vengeance for his apparently having been a SS death camp Kommandant in another life, instruction. A former NPR broadcaster (they found out his voice was only deep when he went on before dawn), he holds a BA in Film & Video from Columbia College (despite never being a film major - take that, film geeks!) and an MA in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California, which he hopes one day to get back from Super Pawn. He has taught writing at both his alma mater simply out of spite and for the United States Navy across the Pacific before Rummy got wise to his being a homo. Born on the South Side of Chicago and not unrelatedly a pretty good shot, Adam resides (nee, is marooned) in Las Vegas, where he has won the Nevada Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry before gop twats eliminated the award to help keep taxes low for struggling companies like Amazon and Zappos. He styles as Verleger / Herausgeber of Danse Macabre, Nevada’s first online literary magazine (which you might be familiar with), and DM du Jour, its daily gazette. He is the author of Miles (kind of like Love, Simon, just a whole lot better) its sequel Shant (screen rights available to any PGA folks that recognize the second half of the compound, homosexual) and the upcoming Rhododendrons of the Sea. The above poems are from Adam’s first poetry collection, Faschingslieder {Carnival Songs}.