Jeremy Szuder - Two Poems

Lush

The briefcase closes up for now,
and a glass of wine 
shifts gently in its orbital bowl
to remind me the refrigerator engine
is not the only heartbeat
keeping this literary lush night
alive and pulsating,
ever the most true.

In knowing this art is 
at best just a ripple below
the holiest radar
set upon this lost city of
desperate angels,

I lean hard on this pathetic
wimpy table
that takes its ass whipping
from my children every 
morning, and I swill around
the bits of loose cranial cork
and I type over and over
the lines in audacious hope
of eliciting the true
recipe of a purple sky,

perhaps the notations 
that emanate from the
candy corn beaks of sleeping birds
hours after they have
escaped the burning aviation fields
of this California runway to
the stars.

The Orchestration of Humanity
(for Brian Wilson)

The sun and the sand have had me
in the arms of this coast for so long.
I reach for the breast of palms and
birds of paradise to
suckle the radio waves that bleated
from the speakers of my youth.

My mind was heaven bound on a
robust setting sun and I fell in love
with all of the long hair and the corduroy
that warmed my nimble inner thighs.

This golden stretch of pavement
and poppies rose early in the damp
grey offshore ghosts of chill,
stirring the clouds like cream and waltzing
with the seagulls whose boastful calls
into the breeze seemed enough to

rip the chords of the sun back out
and into this citrus splash of those
ultraviolet rays on high. This spread
of earthly delight has been brought
here by hands of Gods not yet
carved into wood or captured in
the iris of teenage symphonies,

instead, brought for the
orchestration of humanity.

Hear me now, as I beg of us all,
let our absolute passion with
California ripen onwards, and into
the winds and their chimes that
jostle our rapid eye movements
into sleep, arousing the pillows
of zest as they resonate so joyfully

inside my head and inside my person,
swimming this ocean writing love notes
to the state of my dreams, writing love
notes to the state of my life spent
living.

Jeremy Szuder is a born and bred California native, raised with a tender and dedicated loyalty to the arts. His poems have been published in The Taj Mahal Review, The Metaworker, The Mojave Heart, The Pangolin Review, Harbinger Asylum, The Hungry Chimera, Homesick Zine, Vox Poetica, and Fine Print Literary and Visual Arts Publication. Szuder lives in Glendale California.