The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Paper napkin poems

  • Displacement

    Adrunk
    he becomes
    the drinker
    who drank him.

    Take this cup
    all of you
    and drink
    its whine the engine

    of the cat
    contemplating
    her contempt for her
    need for you.

    Adrift
    on a sea street
    starry eyed
    night
    ears black holes
    no sound
    escapes.

    And the nose tastes
    hours of laundromat fuzz
    falls a third time
    near the blue dumpster
    behind the fishmonger’s
    by the cold chain links
    in a bed of weeds gone to seed
    spreading like a hatch
    of artificial flies.

    One he swallows
    caught
    hooked through the lip
    jumps pulls and runs
    down the path
    to where the deep water
    creeps awake
    in the darkness
    its thick jelled
    mass motions.

  • From the Edge

    From the Edge

    From the edge he walked to the center and hit
    return. He might have felt lost in the clearing,
    returning again and again to the dark margin.

    He thought
    of making a home
    in the clearing,
    planting a meadow
    of words.
    But things changed
    at night
    in the clearing.
    Balderdashes
    ran to and fro.

    He crossed to the other side, the distant
    edge, the clearing now behind him.
    He walked into that far margin,
    and was never seen again.


  • Espressos and the Hippopotamuses

    From the sidewalk table sipping our espressos,
    the vinegary smell from the torch smoke crossing
    from the workers re-tarring the post acute rehab
    hospital entry awning roof across Belmont, we saw

    the first hippopotamus drop to her belly, blocking
    the intersection, car horns jeering futilely, the hippo
    happily like a humongous semicolon, skin winking
    wet, waiting for the independent clause to follow;

    the mother comma still far down Belmont, the paint
    of the hippopotamuses a bubbly brown espresso,
    now tan now black red umber shadows folding and
    rolling in banana slug butter fat, the hippopotamus

    before us yawned and hollered something, now
    in the harsh spotlight of a police helicopter, and
    the buzz from these espressos we expected
    to last for tens of millions of years, by which

    time the hippopotamuses and the whales
    would tenant together the salt water open air
    reservoirs, a sprinkling of reactionary
    helicopters rusting in thick dusty green aloof.