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Exquisite Corpse
Issue 8A Journal of Letters and Life

ISSUE 8 HOME || BROKEN NEWS || CRITIQUES || CYBER BAG || EC CHAIR || FICCIONES || THE FOREIGN DESK
GALLERY || LETTERS || POESY || REVIEWS || SERIALS || STAGE & SCREEN
Four Poems
by Larry Sawyer
Author's Links

The Worried Accountant

Can't get it up, has gone from trying, blind,
the bars all closed, he walks the crooked line,
his racket, there under the leaves never level,
let him pass through this miserable sphere,
draw from her pornographic loins futile strength
to fly from his upside down world into dark.

He emerged from his mother's embryonic dark
and at first probably thought himself blind,
but by using all an idiot's strength,
his life was cut from his mother's line
and crying he coagulated, his cranium's sphere
somehow goofed, future careers now to level.

His father, the gravedigger, spent afternoons level,
would sit watching Wheel of Fortune in the dark,
listened to Monk in his fiery youth, Sphere
knew the score, what are you blind?
he said, then next memory, the unemployment line,
his son flexing nightly numbers for strength.

His taut, young muscular strength
then reached godawful square levels,
he walked block after block, stood in line,
days followed nights into protean dark,
thought classifieds had driven him squinting blind,
but saw offices on the top floor were now his sphere.

His mother suddenly croaked, that otherworldly sphere
to finally discover, he didn't know if his strength
would be enough, from masturbation nearly blind
he now could lay new secretaries out at desk level
snort coke off their blonde arses in the eager dark,
as every night just meant another few lines.
 

It was a dream that told him, the celestial line,
he met his own dead mother in heaven, God's sphere
was one option, either that or take stock in hellish dark,
some mad fear gripped him, paranoia nixed his strength
he flipped, called a last hooker and laid her level,
all the night long she whipped him folded blind.

Dig him now though, no light lines his eyes, his strength
just an egg bald sphere, his sad head level
with sidewalks dark, cup in hand, lying, blind.
 

   
Produce Suit, Please Juice


A renewed taste dries here
by an unreal wall, in a personal world-
scape,      you were invented

[picture of yourself as a child]

the stewardess said your flight
creak you winches

was canceled, yet your plane departs
you teeth in the mouth of the ocean

like words leaving your dry lips

you get that Alexandrine feeling
and a few drinks don't help
wandering the margins of an outdated calendar
the museum of your mind is now closing

instinct develops the tall surf lounges
you are in close proximity to the
splendor of refuse and myth
still you change the sheets of major depression

[cinema verite footage of your first blowjob]

by an unreal wall, you were invented
like words, canceled you get
close to the personal and a few drinks
still change the margins      you are flight

closing in walls close to the invented child
she "gets off," forever out of reach
mistakes this legend for a space station
of sun and the usual mistakes,
fate flunks you in the class of life

[picture of yourself hanging by a thread]

"we wore matching shirts, stopped in the colonnade,"
she coos, "...sipped aperitifs by the light of a
Mickey Mouse moon."
 

 
Bad Novel Sonnet


She met him by the banks of the Ganges
and even though she thought him a sleaze
they walked arm and arm to his bungalow
and watched the second hand to and fro.
They, together, simultaneously groaned
and she, quite sophisticatedly, then moaned
as the earth conceives a volcanic island
she, being prolific, consummately sinned
as no other girl had ever aspired
but then, incognito, an assassin he hired
to remove from her this turbulant life
and failing the gun he employed a knife.
So, this fatal love, repititious at times
has been repeated historically in various climes.
 
 


The Poet Speaks of Highways

I have traveled often these dour
soft shoulders, whipped hips of highways
across legendary peninsulas, languished
angry across medians and interstates
meandering frequently upon the flesh du jour
of loose lipped hitchhikers. Yet still I enter night
each time I look into your eyes. You, the felon
that stole the centerline, left us all here hawking
across great plains. I see you jaywalking and come
accelerating toward you in my mind, let me
homeward drift to someday in the deepest sleep
be with you again, riding cerebral interstates,
rolling in a dream across these cumulonimbus days,
wasting mileage toward that rumbling, cerulean deep.


ISSUE 8 HOME || BROKEN NEWS || CRITIQUES || CYBER BAG || EC CHAIR || FICCIONES || THE FOREIGN DESK
GALLERY || LETTERS || POESY || REVIEWS || SERIALS || STAGE & SCREEN
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