Rick's life was a pair of grinding car transmission
gears, and it was a desk covered in papers;
He could only see a small spec of wood,
and he thought that life is a pile of shit
with a few gold nuggets of joy
buried in it. You have to wade through the shit
first to find the nuggets. His loneliness
was a song on the radio; it played
and then it stopped, but Amy was still a broken
wood floorboard in the middle of his room; she
spoke to him, and his hope was a single
nail pounding the board back into the floor,
but love is a gunshot; you hear it
and then it's gone, and she was a wood
board that became more moldy every time
she ignored him.
Dear Evee, my love for you, was fake and invented
just like this poem masquerading as a letter.
You do not do any more, We were
a white tennis shoe in which I lived
like a toe, able to move but trapped
to your foot, afraid to speak or breathe.
Today, my neighbor tossed a nail ridden
tire on his greasy green lawn, and then I knew it was
your beauty that kept me inside the tennis shoe.
I think beauty binds as well as a deflated
tire secures a wheel, and love strains to inflate
and fill this gap between rim and rubber.
Nothing not even love is permanent.
Nails and rust prove this so, as well as
the uselessness of beauty, without love
to support it. Beauty is a rim coated in speckled rust
like blotches of dull red paint on a gray wall
kept complete by a leaking tire once full of love's air.
Alice coughed behind Jim as they roamed
down the hall, and her cough was as loud
as a cigarette being lit
on a windy day. He stared into the empty
hallway clutching memories of Kay, a landfill
full of the past that never escaped his view. Kay's face
mimicked a black eyed jackal as she screamed
at him for the last time, which reminded him
that love and happiness are bolts of lightning.
They're there and then they're gone. And they never stop striking
and vanishing because history is
a washer that repeatedly cleans the same
clothes at a slightly different temperature
each time, and Kay was the only car he returned
to after he saw the entire lot, but she
was still inside a locked showroom.
Luke says, "I'm Luke Skoza, and I recently graduated with BA in English from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Also, I won the 2009 Academy of American Poets prize for best undergraduate poem during my time at SIUC. Now, I've moved to Chicago in order to work and write for about a year; then, I plan on attending graduate school at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland."
Comments (closed)
Kathy Skoza
2011-10-26 14:16:23
Luke-congratulations- I identified with Bolts- as the memories are still with us.
Rust reminds me nothing is permanent and
Gears made me think of love-how it must
grow and change and we keep up hope- mom