Greg O’Neill

 

 

Roundhouse

This is a story without direction.
Strolling in the garden, it gets
lost among the plants,
tangled in the ivy. Its inertia
saps all activity. In the only bistro
open at this hour, it casually noshes
black grapes, keeps a dream
diary, watches the haze of
pleasant intuition evaporate,
like a phrase from Mahler’s Ninth,
and flips a coin it cannot ever
pocket nor spend.
But who cares, I mean, really.
Yet only one, the child,
with wishes and hopes for a
certain peace,
who can’t get to sleep
because outside the window
the black grapes on the vine
are translating the wind
into Morse Code,
and birds hit the glass like coins
falling from the bedside-table.
Amid all the other business of living
and dying, the orderly ceremonials
go on—dead on.

 

More Poetic Than the Poem

This poem is dedicated to the last yard of concrete
poured, to the specters inside anxiety’s monstrosity
of shadow, to the breathless wrench of my lungs, and
uncommunicated distractions of turning the blind eye,
to the gold band, and the unscaled pinnacle. A poem
to you, the stressed, the distressed, the repressed,
the youth the waves would whisk away, the blur, the
coaching, pruning young spring thoughts. The days
to come, the watershed sort, the afternoon of a poem
written in a dream of light that shines through sleep,
to the hurrying clouds September places tentatively
upon the treeline, to the odious rebuke of youth. This
poem is a highway, a thick scaffolding of asphalt without
off-ramps. This poem is the grappling hook of memory.
This poem is because failed love is a drunkenness you
only attempt to stumble out of, some friction, some fire
rubbed up. Caws bursting brightly from the headlong
world, a strange anointing fended, one more poetic
than the poem.

 

---