Doug Flaherty

Doug Flaherty Poems

Doug Flaherty Biography

Has published poems in 200 journals including The New Yorker, The Nation, Harvard Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Montserrat Review, North American Review, Wisconsin Review,)

The Best Poem Of Doug Flaherty

Demolition

Something of my life might
yet be salvaged, I think.
something saved from my last
twelve billion or so years
from the time I was gas
and spinning dust- a long
time before iron settled in blood
and mucus was only a glint
in a dead smiling god's scheme.
I stare across the acreage at Neenah.
Late October light clarifies houses,
flattens perspective- I'm nearly sitting
on the fat lady's lawn two parcels away.
Embarrassed, I remind myself that Pol Pot,
Idi Amin, and Francisco Franco are still dead,
and intrusions closer to home are forgotten.
Iron in my blood throbs magnetic north.

What makes me such a part of everything,
so volatile, Gelignite is my middle name-
intense about explosions, millions of rug
rats devour millions of pairs of Nikes,
while millions of third-world kids
are sweat-shopped into palsy and blindness.
I would plastic bag my head, seat myself
naked in a bathtub half-full of water to
never have to say hello or good bye.
Never expecting to be recycled with more
value than a few molecules breathed
by a robotic drone on Orion, longing for a
memory chip housing the last song written
before earth collapsed upon itself.
Meanwhile there is the vineyard to tend,
poems readied for when friendship fails.

I believe I have more late October yards
to stare into and lose perspective,
more judgment calls which validate my life,
contrary to all that is too much to believe in.
Face it: hope doesn't spring anything.
Hope is the refuge of dead abstraction,
faith the harbinger of blisters and boils.
Truth is a double-edged teflon blade.
My headstone is left blank for a late entry.
I hear the demolition crew at the door.
Where are you going with your world?

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