five minutes and you're almost dead: 3 Poems by David McLean

the water gets hard

the water gets hard
because it is angry envy

and aspires to life,
just as we aspire to eternity

before we can manage time,
we aspire to being after death

before we have learned
to be precisely alive



each car

each car which insults the street
trudges through the dirt that was white

innocence once (they call white
the color of innocence – i think

their god knows why).
because even the snow

declines with time, as children's
arms get crossed with angry

scars, and love grows tired
blind



guilty blood

the guilty blood runs
because it must

as we scatter junk
through a world

that needs nothing
better, that expects

dutiful replication
and sex, the guilty blood

stinks of the needy seed
that becomes death

next

2 comments:

BOLD MONKEY REVIEW said...

Great, intense writing by McLean- paring our emotions back to the bone once again. I just get this surge of feeling inside that he is continuously reworking the one grand poem, reshuffling twenty key words or so with his reader the knife edge.

RC Miller said...

McLean continues to perfect his minimalistic menace. These are not poems but apparitions. Brilliant.

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