todd

Cody Todd

Three Poems

Epistle from the Guild of Lost Angels

No death here. Poetry a scarecrow of rags hung above squash & pumpkins. I live the naked fictions inside my head until I clothe them with my words. My lover, in the tree, sings of the moon & the fuse. Her absence is a pink fiction of lemonade, ice-cubes, honeybee choirs & summer’s fevered heat on the teeth of her Cheshire grin. I am the point where progress meets decay. Big ocean. I’m gone. The saint asked of the beloved. Because they understand Lee Marvin setting fires on Formosa. Beauty bought by scandal. Forever singing & dancing. A 21st Letter Turn Night, the animal that keeps you alive. Night, the u-turn of the self. Hear sad cows moo their way into the fire. Write the great American novel, and it scatters into the poor American madman’s thoughts in the small tornado of your life. Pull flower petals like prudes. Put on woolen tube socks, boots, and march through your animal rage on Pluto: one big ball of ice too far away. Shoo away friends like flies. You’re no more you than he or she was you. Blue sadness was a happiness that turned its back on you. Poor you. Fuck you. Love, you followed the same path until it finished. You died. You turned the other way and walked it all again. William Carlos Williams By himself, electrocuted; by modernity, his mind snapped taut, that tightrope above the falls, beyond the baseball stadium loaded with a crowd, screaming like wildfire. Ballroom dancing with Marianne Moore beneath the petrified pelican in a taxidermist’s shop. He glanced into the mirror’s modernity and wanted street cars to slalom through the hair on his scalp, wanted Paterson’s newspaper headlines printed on his teeth. A vaudevillian dance macabre when they released Ezra from Pisa. Most of all, Aaron Burr, his outlaw prototype that trumped any cowboy, assassin or confederacy. Modernity was the path, but less linear, less circular, less step stones and more mud. A pointillist’s rain-wet wheelbarrow and white chickens in his old age. They always just happened to be there.

return to  SHAMPOO 39