Dennis Goza

Eclipse at World’s End
(Hingham, MA. 2017)

The legend was too bold
to throw away (heading
for tabloid or Facebook Follies)
but outcomes not nearly so
Miltonic: this ghost
of a once-in-nearly-never
celestial orgasm slid
through the rips
in the tinfoil on our cereal boxes;
the sun took umbrage at our demands
and sulked behind an alibi
of haze. And our fall ramble was not
a fall from grace to pit, but
a granny slope into the retiring
surf, as retreating geese
made quotation marks around the absence
of a spaceship hovering;
and inheritance kept inching
toward entropy.

Yet we’ll continue to hammer
resolutions into journals, to be aged
in adverbs until they morph
into frankenmemories
of retroactive prophecy that imperiled
whatever world we claimed. We’ll keep following
the fizzles, hustling after appointments
with apocalypse, not lusting for revelation but
denouement – a life measured
in goosebumps. We’ll yell
into the cannon’s mouth, inflict wounds
in order to invent bandages, and pray
that fiddles can be bumped into tune,
while trusting that truth
is a footnote to history.

 

First Colonoscopy

Smiles painted
by the numbers, welcome you
as if into a cotton
candy emporium above
an opium den. Would they,
decked in sisterly white, hostess
you thus even if they’d peeked
at your Tarot card and found
the hanged man, the drowned Phoenician?

You twist and re-twist the abacus
of the odds, lumping
on one side the episodes
of SOS – few, yet ponderous because
gnarls make news. They plunk
on the scale, flipping away
like gauze the others – far more
plentiful, yet untouted because
their courses ran smoothly as a laser.

Soft alarm now. Time to pull
the world around your head,
squeezing yourself
through a needle’s eye, into the dark
substratum where prayers
eventually are dumped.

 


Dennis Goza, who now travels the world teaching theatre and English in under-served
communities, previously toured the U.S. for 32 years, entertaining children and their adults. While a
film critic and actor in San Francisco, he was involved in the founding of the San Francisco
International Fringe Festival in 1992. A multiple award-winning poet, playwright and songwriter, he
has written more than a dozen plays for the theatre company he co-founded, and has composed the
music for many of the productions. His plays have been selected for production in festivals at Fury
Theatre in Chicago, North Park Playwright Festival in San Diego, the Renegade Theatre in Los
Angeles, the 10 By 10 In The Triangle Festival in North Carolina, and the University Of Houston. His
poetry has been published in Clockhouse, Gemini, Dime Show Review, River River, Waccamaw Journal,
Barely South Review, The Helix, The Finger. Grand Little Things and Chariot Press Literary Review;
and he has published a volume of poems, Tortoise Dances. You can follow him around the world at
activatedadventures.com