Garth Pavell - Five Poems

My Mind Is A Dirty Tool

Your pharmalogical breath petered out like the sun
Sets irreversible timetables, nurturing perishable dreams
Prone to bone the revised reenactments of evolution
For everything in the universe is capsulated, I suppose
Stuck inside itself not very different than how our
Marriage’s repetitive strain injury could never stop
Lunesta and Corona from romancing my skull to pack
Its bags with the insensitivity of a great glassblower
No longer in love with the process of elimination
My friends say I have a second once in a lifetime chance
To peek into the past and see how our infantile dollhouse
Prepared me to go beyond your fragile cold little walls
Your sickness hated me so much and yet I know you
Wanted me to be infected with your destructive love
But I graduate every night yet often stay after school
Scraping away at our history, my mind is a dirty tool



Imagine The Poetry Of North Korea

Silently growing in a field of thawing grass
Cold blades pinpoint periscope visions
Like industrious monks sand paint
The seasons of our sorrow into a transient bouquet

But when lavish feelings sprout beside a rockless radio
Undernourished ink lacks the vocabulary to vocalize
Randomized precision revaluates the regime’s
Unread bookish state workers cropping their senses

Which is theoretically no different than how I scratch out
A living in advertising sales. Of course I can eat a snickers
Or distract myself with the internet’s bubble gum flavors
All from my little plot of desk, tilling away for a rainy day

Which typically comes on Friday night. And Saturday too
But you know the impetus to deconstruct the machine
Secretly dates all of our poetic surplus
We simply labor to get lucky

Loving upon different dirt under the same succulent sun



Meditations On Telling The Truth

The immanence of four-dimensional honesty
bows only to itself because you see it’s more
than double jointed, perhaps so perverse and
true it makes love through our infinite rearview
encroaching hands of time, mirroring intuitive
traffic that simultaneously comes like raindrops
fired from the company of clouds up all night,
skydiving overhead when suddenly an angle of
law decides to call it illegally prescribed meds,
arresting anyone suspiciously kind or absorptive.

In other words the conversations that get us in
trouble tend to be the toxic remedies fertilized
in dorms burnt by oily black-eyed men sailing
into the sunset with expensive dinosaur breath.
Towns of tabernacle stitched market conditions
with one leg up cock tease the good ole’ sports
misjudging commutes or their car’s homework.
Freedom comes in many flavors, the chocolate
and butterscotch continents are personal favorites
but then I’m partial to hybrid-hearted households.

Back when xoxo was an intimate code translating
the illiterate music of our ancestors’ rhyme shaped
mistakes, well rehearsed industry prepped the salt
to raise awareness like a stakeholder’s breathing
bank account lethargically optimizes our chagrin.
The truth’s multiple points of view prick the past
and future, melt the currency that we must rob to
misconstrue the rainbow curling at our feet.
Absolution bathes in the twilight of our senses,
the corpse of crimes buried in fleeting innocence.



The Irony Of Being

I lived in the village, a mile from ground zero.
For three days and nights, ghost colored fire trucks packed
the cremation of innocence into our narrow minded streets.
I told my Muslim girlfriend I was suffering,
that my heart had gone bankrupt.
She smiled, cupped her hands around my glass and said,
Civilization is a paradise in progress.
We toasted a playground of ideas and drank until
we were two atheists seeing the God-colored dawn
beyond the black bridge between men’s imaginations
where our preservation awaits to be thought.



Whiskey Sours We Once Made

I gave my ex-wife
Everything - you can imagine.
The getaway gutted
my wallet that housed
the occasional wad
of spiritual incongruities
we’ve all seen fall
flat on our crumpled presidential
faces so at home on bar counters.

When she died
she gave it
to her friends
and charities
except the one
that had taken
care of her.

I remember when we met in college
I corralled her industrious desire
beside the moon tinted lake near my home
town where afterwards we’d walk past
the colonial styled houses on Main Street
with their golden electricity percolating behind
lace curtains dangling over open furtive porches.
And she would paint domesticated psychedelia,
luring my language behind the draped windows
where she took a self-imposed oath to serve me
strong black coffee in little white cups
but of course this was long before her health
declined and her outlook imploded or was it
the other way around? The important thing is now.

She’s standing on the jetty overlooking the sea.

And when I submit this poem to the lit journals
some will not even recognize her red scarf
pecking at the free (or as she would say)
“indecisive” wind roaming the rocks like a lone
cherry bobbing in the ocean of delicious
whisky sours we once made.



Garth Pavell’s poems have appeared in a variety of print and online journals. He recently published in Canary, Poetry Super Highway and The Writing Disorder. Garth is also a songwriter and fiction writer and works for a nonprofit in New York City.