BJ Ward

“A man awakes every morning and instead of reading the newspaper reads Act V of Othello. He sips his coffee and is content that this is the news he needs as his wife looks on helplessly.”

“I am thinking of poets who havent written well in years but who rubbed against the sun twenty years ago-- Arent they in their own kinds of prisons too?”

“From ragbag, stumblebum, peripatetic lout To bonfire of catnip that burns itself out-- Bristled sack of hiss & claws Cinched at the maw--”

“In that house I built a bonfire that illuminated the fecund earth around it. And in that split-level my friend Tommy, only eight teeth left in his whole head, dug a huge illegal grave to bury his fathers packhorse. He marched that sumpter into the dark study and shot its head on the left so it would fall right. That night, as if to argue with the day, Karen and I made love on the front lawn of the mansion one cul-de-sac down, four feet away from what would be a window cracked open to allow the outside in.”

“leads to Bear Down-- Bear Down gives way to little crown-- Crown concedes the Head-- then Head produces All-- Snip the fruity cord-- little King begins to bawl then grows bored-- So begins his fall--”

“The words I speak to these chairs must be silencing. It has stunned them into a profound emptiness. No creaking from the gallery-- no James Joyce here, nor Malory-- An unknown author in a very large chain-- cant you hear me rattling?”

“Out in this profane city, sometimes sidewalks seem the only cement that connects us, pressed by the sacred strangers we will never touch.”

“I have nothing but duct-taped syntax to offer them-- noise of jury-rigged verse, of entire days burned by the focus of a foremans glare, the labored breath of an exhausted ride home while she sings in a tiara and cape to tuxedoed men and bespangled women. Yet the world sounds most honest to me when its timing chain is slightly off. How it revs, how it almost sputters out on any given evening after a long day of work.”

“Little bucktoothed alligator ready to taste my bills. Make something suffer. Make something stick.”

“A poem is a windy city, has broad shoulders and insistent industry, barrels into your brain, sticking its steam-filled, swarmy head into the delicate, empty bird cages propped in the rooms of your imagination. A poem can be rude, downright ignorant of what you had been thinking about and holding onto for too much of the day. More than a city, a poem pushes its hemispheres against your thoughts, knocking them out of the windows of your ears. Every good poem screams, Read me because youre going to die someday!”