4 Poems

 

  by Keith Higginbotham

 

 

 

 

Bleeker Street

 

 

A black stage.  The principal

enters.  It is not yet daylight in the photographic

reproduction of misunderstanding.  A green

 

telephone eclipses the difficulty of not

finding the hotel on ice.  It is a tragic
     interrogation

of secret staircases and cryptograms.

 

Monotony doesn’t celebrate a fond table set

in mannered style or ironic expressions of greed.

If I found you furnishing the civilized world

 

with pristine thrones of cloven hearts,

I’d purchase the soft white birds with ornamental

confectionery embellishing the whistle of notice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snowball

 

 

1.

 

to try establish

samples whether there reason

why some blood people are

 

2.

 

will be shown on tv

next week ahead of the world

aids day in the film

 

3.

 

the plan of critics

claim will bring mayhem to and

byways this remote south

 

4.

 

has been holiday

whose syringes contain those

riots, ethnic killed

 

5.

 

in his shirt pocket

pen blue as local tribal

elder and he was

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bosco

 

 

in a skybox, cupcaking on

polecat static.  this wind is

property.  this

 

the only route to

exhausted flavor in the middle

of a summer mansion.

 

i hear the instincts that stared

down the sledgehammers among

the shoes of quiet intoxication,

 

the butcher-paper square that

projected 1930s authenticity

on rainy days behind the

 

defunct metaphoric teenage saloon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Moderne Sonnet of Fourteen Lynes

 

 

Thy miget wyfe apothecary

wan hindred stone alone to tarry

Er sleething in’s heaven’s wondred skye

is turn-ed pollen’s daybrake marry

 

Thy martyr’s done amist the broache

of sinners scone and clip and roache

and hids’t thou wandres’t mud skeddaddle

in vixen reigns on sleigh bed’s coache

 

Is skin’s a scarn thou knows’t him hid

and frowns yon burrow owl he did

thy mysry’s wisp a dude on crackle

rydes sideways on the roade to syd

 

Him pantaloons o’ black and sloth

torne t-shirt rounde a tourniquet goth

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keith Higginbotham’s poetry has appeared in Hanging Loose, Lost and Found Times, Lilliput Review, and many others.  He is the author of a chapbook, Carrying the Air on a Stick, published by The Runaway Spoon Press.  He teaches creative writing, Fiction, American literature, and composition at Midlands Technical College in Columbia, SC.