Marty McKenna

sometimes when the traffic weakens
you feel you could have the run of the city
in memorium. when there were
no capitalisations, only silent confetti
...

i carve you out
of already alive
and lavish landscapes; build silent,
lived horizons about you, still do.
...

i have asked
rich women and men;
do the dead mourn us?
...

as rain sloshed everything else,
you in my gut, again.
i try to think about outside,
...

spirited hounds
leave no stone unturned,
haunt fair game
in nature's realm.
...

Where water wets, memory pulls - age four
Or maybe five - The clanks excite still now
Unknown game - Symmetrical Blocks, of where
Mother and I, Windows of the van
...

those paintings, under the spell
of sparkling psychosis
led me through the passage of time
to this day, where, when i close my eyes,
...

red lights were snipers
and i was my grandfather
teaching his daughters
how, and what to shoot.
...

the darkness of the bar
is reassuring, it has me sit
neatly in it.
...

how could i not
permanently turn the chair
to this window.
...

the hay is turned
in the fields as i sway
with the engine block,
turning over, at speed.
...

it's a smaller pill today;
dissolves on the tongue
if i let it,
makes me forgetful.
...

i would squint at red.
part it to shards,
plant one calcium seed and soon
we would have a fresh light,
...

muldoon on the mirrors
of the lift, the building falls
backwards by wisps of cumulonimbus.
...

i'm thinking of holly,
her unpublished dreams;
her death so silent that night,
...

the building opposite
stands naked.
steel needles of mesh,
rusted and fixed in
...

in a blur of florid psychosis
the kitchen was my galley
and i a captain with my two passengers
playing chess at the other end of the hull.
...

light thickens.

i know this because i watch it
from the edge of darkness;
...

there's a space
where our snowman stood,
a space which you could
fill right now, darlin'.
...

when it was less hectic, when it was
less wild; when it was bearable, when
it was almost normal i would rise
at six or seven or eight and wait
...