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Poetry |
5 Poems: Scott Wannberg
| Agony River Temperature has a headache swears it won't rise to your occasion Speeding patrol cars out of fashion find enough time to spotlight your cold skin Agony River just called collect promises to flow to the front door in a few hours Strange faces from the ongoing confusion only make the decision that much harder Pull the plug or mop up the bleeding deck one last time in hope it will never show up again Pain aches for you and it calls me over and wants to know the secret of reaching you Idiot, I tell it, the only secret is in the sunlight, how it still finds a way to bathe you when all the experts have run off to the airport for their red eye flights home Agony River winds its way to the sea and we are nothing more than belligerent fish waiting for some omnipresent hook to call on us for some kind of sustaining belief Cholesterol My father disappeared because too much cholesterol fell in love with the bitter skin he built a fort in. Tragedy yodels in the accumulated trash pile that passes for urban renewal. Rain left its resume on our bareheaded vacations, we tried to conquer countries that only existed in our heads; come and drink from the trough of hope with me I will stand alongside you no matter how many people claim you were the guilty one as the desperate weather makes it hard to get the party invitations to the right people. My intentions got arrested for vagrancy and I wait for my lawyer to call except whenever the phone rings the clowns make so much noise I can't hear a thing. Love, I promise you Love will still find us in the smoke when the war is over and the actors have turned in their scripts Love will still find a way to ask us out on a date The cholesterol rises to the drunk sailor moon the seas try to sing to us but forget our words Love will still need us if it hopes to make it home in time for the christening. Dogs Of Heat So the coffee ran away from you in the panic that came down. You were too far gone to actually appreciate the newly discovered planet that fell on your best laid plans. It took a few hours to scrape it all up from the sidewalk of plenty, it took a few hours for the ambulances to get unlost. Songs with their hair all wet stand empty eyed in the hallalujah afternoon, waiting for the word to come down from the hills of bop, they wait with their visas not yet stamped with the chorus of approval. In the panic that continually comes down I will hold your fear close to my heart, I will let your fear inside me, and the dogs of heat will not cool themselves off too quick at our expense. I found a huge book full of mistakes waiting for me to add mine to them, I found a huge book of mistakes asking me to leap head first into their length and width. The castle has melted into fog the invincible hours are village idiots our dogs of heat are at peace finally with the wounded forest, where mythology becomes stale lead in news at six p.m. I wandered around waiting for the mother ship to find a home for me, I wandered in your blood and when asked if I knew the right time I showed them a picture of you and I think they finally got it and went off to learn how to sing. Taxicab Ride to Hell By the seventh sea by the drunk's acceptance speech by the looks of my lost ability to see clearly by the edge of all accessible exits I hear the taxicab ride to hell spewing toxic drama and loud crapshoot temperature I needed to get some sleep I needed to find some assurance The doctor came in and began to dance He said I will be young one day By the clairvoyant hootenanny dance floor By the leprechaun light By the oxygen tank love affair You can feel the beginning of this long ago prayer It says You are the One who Will Not be Burned by the Sun It says You are the Tune that will Teach us to Love One Another Yeah sure The dark energy claps its unruly hands loud and makes my hearing wince Come on baby, let me take you to a place where nobody has to apologize ever Come on baby, let me whisper my new tabula rasa Dogs will have their sniffing day And Monsters can stand all incoming heat Let me see you shimmy in the radiation heartland Let me see you bop to the oldies The taxicab ride to hell has room for you and me and a whole lot more Bring your albums, bring your fears and hopes We got all day we got all night Around and around the defenses we roll The black pirate flag of I need you begins to fly The raging seas begin to siphon us into their plans The taxicab ride to hell is a mighty fine adventure Come on baby, bring your justice bring your art Meteor showers will inaugurate us Tapdancers will take us to dinner We got all the time in all the worlds The unruly chimpmunks are writing our love notes They are having a very fun time The Large Monster Demands Love Quit decaying all over my bedroom floor I'm sorry I took your 9 Tana Leaves to Texas they swore immortality would be a good thing There are agile dancers with sweet legs who would love to get close to you, baby. The House of Inhuman Activity is rearing its head and they are going to ask me to sing. Many hip people disappear and large monsters demand love, as the cold weather begins to write a biography and somehow you and me are prominently alive in it. |
Scott Wannberg overweight 48 year old bookstore clerk who sits at this machine and lets stuff hopefully bubble through while listening to the likes of Tom Russell,Townes van Zandt,John Prine,etc...my last child,Nomads of Oblivion, was put out by Lummox Press here in Southern California. |
| Edited By Jim Chandler & Haze McElhenny Site Design & Cover Graphics By UrbanDecay.Org |
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