Election Section

Poems

By Patrick Fenix
Friday December 21, 2007

In one of Graham Greene’s novels his protagonist is alone in a hotel room obsessively pursuing and squashing bugs... 

Once upon a recent time your friend in West Berkeley found a spider trapped in a large plastic bowl in his bathroom... The spider was not able to negotiate the smooth walls of the bowl. Your friend occasionally placed a drop or two of water or a smaller insect in the bowl... Finally he decided to give the spider a choice. He fastened a few inches of dental floss to a chopstick, laid the chopstick across the top of the bowl so that the floss hung to the bottom of the bowl. The spider very quickly clambered up the floss, crossed the chopstick to freedom, and disappeared triumphant. 

Your friend freed the spider, therefore he is. 

(In the next installment the spider comes back, dragging a page from Kafka’s The Castle, and another from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov, searching for the plastic bowl and muttering something about “freedom.” Stay tuned.) 

 

II 

I’m just an eye sitting on a rock. 

It’s not easy 

Sharing my vision 

With people who have two eyes  

And two feet, 

Who work and suffer. 

It’s lonely being an eye on a rock. 

 

 

 

III 

I am an explosion. 

I go through the void of the years 

Cooling, 

Sizzling through the black holes, 

The loves, 

Cooling. 

Ah. it is good to cool off,  

When you are nothing but an explosion. 

 

IV 

Growing Old Gracefully? 

Then, they wanted to catch a whiff 

of my aura, 

And now? 

Bask in the chill nearness of  

decomposing? 

Maybe not so many  

As wanted to catch a whiff of my aura, 

Sexual chemistry, 

Intellect, spirit, potency, genital magic. 

 

Truth In The Desert 

I’m a clump of desert shrubs. 

Being truthful is my game, 

Sitting without moving, 

Serving silently the truth. 

 

Can’t I have a burst of lying? 

A bloom of flame and gone? 

Can’t I scream a bit of fakery 

And dash across the sand? 

 

Can’t I open legs in passion? 

Or fasten lips to a sweet cactus 

Under my shadow? 

 

Or must I always be a clump, 

A truthful clump? 

So pale, so tough, so enduring, 

With my sources hidden deep 

Deep deep below the poker faced 

Expanses of sand, 

Prickly humming sand, 

Rictus smiling sun.