Its a cold, hard, world out there
these are cold hard times


Kini Collins, City Bird, 2007

Living the Good Life
-- Frank Stanford

There is only one locale for the heart
And that's somewhere between the dick and the brain.
I don't believe love is for chickenshits.
It's low, dark, and cold-blooded, like a cottonmouth.
Children are often involved. They stink
When they sprout in the garden of light,
And they stink mulching their way back down.
Cold-hearted women, work, madness, and death
Are the things separating the nuts from the shells.
Everything else is strictly a pile of shit-
Except for childhood, which we moon over
Because it smells to high heaven. So, go it
Alone. Solitude is a constellation:
People can't connect light anymore,
The only code they can break is darkness.
You can get a file in the heart
But you can't jimmy love -a woman once said
It'd take a shotgun to open my heart.
All the time I was on my knees in the bathroom
Crying like a fool. No one knows
How to love anybody's trouble, nothing will
Deaden the chiggers of pain sucking
Blood in your sleep -oh beautiful tree frogs,
Sonic in the nasty oil of evening, I love you,
Sounds by yourselves a star's life away.
But it doesn't mean a goddamn thing.
Death isn't cold, dark, and quiet.
It is a love letter written on an X-ray.
Better still, it's a manta ray
Squealing in your wife's drawers.
Is this where your will is kept?
What sleek doing is she dreaming of tonight?
How much money do you have in the bank?
Are your early years filed away
In another bureau under another name?
Ask me no questions, I'll still tell you lies,
My father would sing like a bull frog.
I thought my father was a flat-out wonder,
A faraway and constant stranger in my midst.
He wasn't even my father, the cuckold.
So do Lord help the bucket mouth son
Doing a job on doom and eating banana flips.
I for one leave the transcendence of language
To the auctioneers on the widows' steps,
And to the truck drivers with ears
Looking for the smoke on the road.
As for the snow that drifts ever
So silently into the eyes of children,
It is all full of shit from the north
And radiation from the west.


Soaking Wet
-- Frank Stanford

A hawk lived in the chinkapin

At night he flew
Up in the cockeyed light of our truck
And curled around the moon
When we saw it
Like virginia creeper

I would lie in the white dust of the road
And rip out nails
From the waterlogged boards

The sounds we make of an evening
Like bulls having nightmares
Chinese geese eating minnows

When the heat of the day
Is dark and quiet
And on its haunches
I let out my nurse's thread

What titties she has
Soft as sacks of sand on the levee

A bird puts a hole in the radiator
With his beak
When we hit him at night

One morning a snake sucks the eggs
And one evening I climb the tree
Set fire to the nest