David Nelson Bradsher Poems

The iron-colored skies present
their plushy soft-tops with the swirled
depictions of a world
that match the furrowed firmament.
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The coked-up party boys all cruise about,
shouting for more, or more than that, in cars
jetting on Hollywood past sidewalk stars
down Highland to the Sunset In and Out.
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Agreed, tonight was not my best
performance, but forgive the gaffe
and stifle your insulting laugh.
It surely does affect my rest,
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The breeze is urgent, crisp, and like a stream
of consciousness that musses thinning hair.
Autumn arrives—she settles like a dream
that brightens life before the trees go bare.
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My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How come it then that this her cold is so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
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A Study in Rodin

She strolled with grace—a goddess in a fur—
holding a handbag and a champagne flute.
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I courted melancholy in a Gordon Lightfoot song,
the softly-aching folly of a yearning to belong,
but that recording cost me and my drained convictions show
how that remembrance lost me to the claws of undertow.
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The passersby, oblivious to him,
were rushing home to families and fires
as he observed the winter gloaming dim
and fade into a February night.
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The drapes—as sheer as ghosts—
flutter and gently sway in time
to the soft xylophonic chime
of wind-conducted toasts.
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Enabled

for Charles Delaine Bradsher, Sr.
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