Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Joe Amaral - Three Poems

Erosion

The sunlight appears wooden today
A dense ice cube
Cranky with crystalline cold
Landslides spatter the squirming trail

Death succors my demeanor
Seeing uprooted trees via sharp spades
Desiccated and hollow as my thoughts
Yearning for an end to this destruction

Scents of chainsaw oil sterilize crisp morning
Spiraling tree rings speak morosely
Decades of standing tall instantly disposed
Mankind scuffing clean air with his manacles

Papery leaves scrape across cracked stones
Fingernails caressing a chalkboard
Harmony of squealing hellions

My happy dog still gallops in the grassy field
Until a ranger orders a leash to choke her throat
Goosebumps ridge my tensed forearms

It all makes our hackles rise tectonically
And my dog is growling in disgust
Knowing the call of the wild no longer



Elder Undulations

All those hideous brains stick to our boots
Gum wads littering a playground

We melt in impaling light too bright for blind eyes
Wizened words unfurling from wrinkled tongues
Earthworms gyrating free from soiled captivity

Young and reckless in summertime restlessness
We wore cotton ball eye patches pretending to be pirates
The ancient walls shunned our concrete shadows
Reborn from cracked shells of molten bottle caps

Sugar high, sugar low

Thinking the end of the horizon where the road disappears
Must be where forever could be found
We swung until rust severed our chain link leather seats

Bodies now aging in barns of bones and sawdust
Amongst castaway tatters of past implements
Chicken de-beakers and beheaded tools
Guttural caricatures carved onto frail crossbeams

Fixated on self-reflective geriatric musings
We read tousled pages crumpled by war-torn hands
Our youth once exploded these callused mirrors

Drawn in the drowning of liquid time
Ripples on a pond since dissipated



My Corpse

Pink fingertips slough away first,
avulsing softly off the bone
Degloved bits of blanched flesh

Toes wiggle free from metatarsals
Tiny maggots burrowing beneath
darkle black decaying soil

They nestle under nutrient rich earth
Snuggling up to her inner core
Kept warm by natural fire

Body appendages putrefy slowly
Seeping and rotting juices
Bloated overripe grapefruit

My skeleton is taking its time,
fighting the roots for room
Macabre leering marionette

The stubborn heart is always last
A penultimate organ donation
to finish postmortem pulsation

On swirls of cradling winds
my carefree soul dances wild
Flying on the drafts of demise

Free from the constraints
of this cadaverous world
Of anatomical human life



Joe Amaral is a paramedic who spends most of his time outdoors spelunking around the central coast of California. His work has appeared in A Handful of Dust, Carcinogenic Poetry, Certain Circuits, Cranked Calorie, Eclectic Flash, Paradigm, RED OCHRE LiT, Underground Voices and in anthologies by Pill Hill Press and Wicked East Press.

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