The Literary Review
CÁYETE
I no longer know what anything means.
Not that that matters. It doesn’t. Misspeak.
It’s all the rage. Don’t go for broke, go for broken.
Whom the gods would destroy they first make vivid.
I was thinking of a word I can no longer remember.
It began with “k.” Tundish—that was it!
Funny what refuses to enter the serrated cortex.
Whom the gods would destroy they first make civil.
The lure of the abbatoir. That’s where the abbesses live.
The abbots and the rabbits have all been bespoken for.
The world’s at sixes and sevens. In other words, 42.
Whom the gods would destroy they first make timid.
- Bill Yarrow
DAGGER HOLIDAY
Step up! Step up,
but stop giving us shanks.
In the Heraclitan stable of greed
the unkempt debts keep ravaging love,
yet bumps of theft live in the gut.
The good, the bad, the deranged…
The aesthetic dentist who’s helping poison the talcum stream of fire…
The little totalitarian in the fishing pit hanging on by the stem of his arrears…
The mother in a lit suicide…
Many attend the lip conference where the bungalow is water
but few the geography enclave where the screen door is a fabric grenade.
The buttonless stuttering.
The sawdust of placid questions.
You are concussive smoke’s first choice.
The pacifist’s cobblestones—her plaid and ravaged straps.
- Bill Yarrow
- Bill Yarrow
THE OXYGEN CATASTROPHE
Infiltration by capitalists results
in the rising poor doomed to invisibility
like a recessive gene at the bottom of a map.
The dictionary provides the word for today:
legerdemain: feeling as if magically possessed
by handiwork; an incantatory dullness.
Reaching for a familiar stigma, you may feel
unnerved by the vitality of many bad decisions.
“Don’t neglect a routine colonoscopy,” you are told,
but the voice inside your head screams back,
“of the soul.” Then, guilelessly, greed appears,
disrobes, and takes a dip in the excess pool.
Together, we watch decadent time downshift into first, see,
with nefarious envy, the formative eye the summative, and
hear a faulty wind-farm propeller begin demurely to squeal.
- Bill Yarrow
GRAND MAL, CONTENT INVISIBLE
Like a stalwart commander on the edge of an abandoned parapet,
I was an expert in the invisible.
My sell phone began to ring. It was invisible Mr. Peccable.
“If you would just agree,” he said, “I wouldn’t have to insist.”
“That, de facto, is somewhat true,” I told him.
“But so are Clarissa Harlot’s invisible drawers.”
I heard his heart begin to buzz unnaturally loudly.
“Tell that,” he said impressively, “to the invisible jacarandas.”
- Bill Yarrow
- Bill Yarrow
FACTS NOT YET IN EVIDENCE
Like my desire for tuna with arugula,
my love for Antonia knew no bounds.
“The future depends on your restraint,” she told me,
but is there anything worse than preemptive restraint?
She wanted to be a poet. “You know,” I told her with sudden deftness,
“poets are selfish creatures, musing only of their muses.”
So, there I was—lonely as pantyhose, solitary as a simple noun
searching for a copulative verb. Sometimes, desire’s a bear to cross.
My weeping only made her livid. I turned onto the dislocated
shoulder of the road looking for the nearest uninhibited abyss.
The hot oxygen of nowhere to go calmed me. Anyway,
death pays no attention to those screaming for relief.
I’d been early warned, but Jesus’ creatures, I’m back in Antonia’s
ink-stained arms! Someone please remind me of all I know.
- Bill Yarrow
- Bill Yarrow
