Sample poem from "Brushfires"

Salad Days


Drop out of space-time,
Brushing fragments of your last relationship
From your back and arms
Divergent echoes of her
Spilling from your weary trail
Exhausted, yes, but
You're going to try again.

The intrinsic knot of nine
Microscopic dimensions:
Therein lies the key
The grooves that record reality
The underbelly of existence --
In one sense vanishingly thin
But with so many dimensions to play with
You can assign six of them to time
And still move in any direction you can perceive.

So take stock: what happened this time?
Everything was going so well
You aced every test
Graduated second place from the Academy
(wouldn't do to be too conspicuous)
And hooked up with the Vegephiles
Just as you planned.

But then things started to go wrong
Charlene was no pansy;
She was all tongue, and
For a while that seemed to be a plus.
She introduced you to new modes
Of stimulation – intellectual and sensual,
Of which you had not conceived.
Not since the Venus flytrap incident had you learned
So much from a woman or a plant.

But then you blew it,
I mean your paper about temporal interleaving
Laid it all out.  She confronted you,
She understood poly-dimensional re-threading
Like no vegetation ever had
"I'm not your first!" (blades quivering
With suppressed rage, thinking of all those
You had put down roots with;
It didn't matter they had all had her name.)
"Baby, you are always the first!"
You pleaded with her to stay,
But you weren't watering any beds
With that line.

Then things really got tense.
She sicked Passionflower on you
Her unfurling tendrils racing you to the door.
Barely had you got free of the greenhouse when
Ivy burst through the sidewalk
Coiled around your ankles and
Crushed you in her toxic embrace
Bamboo palisades didn't just
Impale your flitter,
They hoisted it 50 meters in the air,
Ripped it apart..
The toad lily barked at you
When you got home and you almost
Didn't get in the door, the carpet needed a shave
And when you looked at your face in the mirror
It looked decidedly greenish.
In the end you had to call in the Goat Squad
And retreat from the world to try again.


The end


Another & where to order

http://dreamsandnightmaresmagazine.blogspot.com/2011/10/poem-reprinted-from-brushfires.html