like cicadas

By Ben Adams

the world spins like
a fractured disco ball
noise screeching through
the room
like a wounded jackal
like madness
and military footsteps pound the
floor
like falling pianos,
cannon fire.

cicadas like
well fed poets
fill the night
with static
and the crowd gathers
like molecules of oil,
a school of puffer fish
greasy and bloated
to the
feeding.

the world spins the same in
ivory towers & amp; football
fields, skyscrapers & auto
factories, insurance companies
and hippie communes, turning
and turning, like wheels
on a bent axle, unsteady on its feet
a drunken man.

while the rest cling to sanity with
gritted teeth, cigarettes
and six packs, hamburgers &
coffee, street maps, bus timetables
and shopping lists, scribbles
on the wall of a highway
rest stop:

anything but the
buzzing of the abstract masses like
cicadas

anything that might
shine clearly, like emblems
of
the truth.

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jungle cat

By Ben Adams

at 11 p.m. wednesday I return
five books of poetry borrowed
from the barr smith library

having scanned through each of them
in turn, finding nothing but
landscaped academia: the gordian lines

of creative writing professors who
squeeze conrad’s dark wilderness
into middle class backyards.

afterwards I light a cigarette and drive
to a strip club on hindley street
with bad lighting and no entry fee

where twenty dollars slipped in the palm
of a wide hipped blonde
leads me to a booth and i sit

drink in hand, looking up
between the double-d breasts of this
c-grade dancer:

the lines of her jungle cat body
shimmering,
like pages and pages
of unwritten
verse.

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