And You Don’t Even Have to Leave the Building
Dean Young
But you will have to be rescued by clouds.
The fundamental principles of comedy and
tragedy differ only in the last act.
The appearance of peacocks may suggest
festivity but, when you get right down to it,
they’re nasty and unclean, and if you ever
tried to toss them crumbs, you’d know exactly
what I mean. To be wounded by a peacock,
tragic or comic? But enough about you.
When I was born, I stank. There was a feeling
not unlike burning. I have worked as yeoman
flogger, igniter of rags, fragment in the stop-
gap of appeasements a long, long way from home.
My mother I never knew and here is my plea to you.
Our brothers, poorly provisioned in their prickly
outreaches, bicker among staggering mules.
Our sisters run dry of ores, gears still.
Twenty dollars buys so little yet
so much twine! To discover a leak
in a bicycle tire, plunge the tube
into a bucket of water and squeeze, prompting
the diagnostic bubbles. Alas the same thing
can not be done with a human heart. Subsiding
is the summer morn and n’er oft the welkin. . .
well, it is difficult to go on. Please, how
can too much be asked? Yes, I was educated
in Bath but through no fault of my own,
the forms were incendiary. For a short while
was member of the Blue Urger group but refusal
to sketch harbors in fog with eyes unclosed
led to expulsion, wandering and arrest yet
I love harbors in fog. My skin was not always
thus. Renounced all past work. Mental lapses,
sure, who don’t? Painted Tug in 87. Refused
to sign Document of Reformed Desire, accused
of unearthly sympathies by counter-resistance,
mud-wallowing by intransigent hangers-on.
Same old same old. Renounced all past work.
J, mostly in red, a series, never completed
I loved her so. Proteins discovered leaked
on milk pillow, December 91. Helped to stage,
hat kept blowing off. Seashells, menacing
seashells impossible to ignore. Recognize
no one. You think you’ll recover but you
never recover. Unmarked in Pennsylvania.
Am survived.
Tables of Content
Seventeen (Fall 2003)
Sixteen (Spring 2003)
Fifteen (Fall 2002) Fourteen (Spring 2002)
Thirteen
(Fall 2001) Twelve (Spring 2001)
Eleven (Fall 2000)
Ten (Spring 2000)
Nine (Fall 1999) Eight (Spring 1999)
Seven, (Fall 1998) Six, (Spring 1998)
Five (Fall 1997) Four (Winter/Spring 1997)