Shawn+Moss

Poetry

"Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you – like music to the musician or Marxism to the communist – or else it is nothing..." – Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Field Trip (Revised)

Deep breath, outside morning sun Those were the things i expected to see only clouds and smoke gave sorrowful greeting Broken down car, rainy sky that's what i saw Down the street past the trees small birds chirped their distress Flightless in the heavy downpour but still we walked, chattering children voices were drowned out by repeated thunder claps. A hand just as small in my own was the only comfort Until we were safely inside that big yellow house with walls and rooms filled with pages and ink.

Ode to a Sweet Rose

A Rose a flower of sweetness sharing its smell with those who dare to touch it Does a Rose divide itself unto its offspring each flower smelling less sweet will a flower of a flower not smell as sweet will the fourth flower of the fourth flower lose all sweet smell of the original? But that cannot be so this rose has existed since the beginning of time unless the very first rose that shared its smell with the new born world was ever sweeter than this

Alas i wish i could go back in time and bring you that flower but for now all i offer is this single sweet smelling rose.


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Easter Love

Before i was just like an egg then she came Dressed up my life and made me colorful Then she suddenly left me alone for another person to find Thats when she found me and admired my color She looked inside but didnt like what she saw Left me broken there on the ground Thats when she came back to retrieve what she'd left saw me in my mess She picked my up, pieced me back together Kept me by her side dispite how destroyed i was She was first and no matter who came after I want to forever be with the one who changed my heart.

"I'm Going to send my Valentine's to people you don't even know." Across the seas to foreign lands, people very different from our own Somone I can converse with through paper and pen rather than face to face How can you tell me my love cannot traverse oceans then? It is not a physical thing that has limits, It is an emotion It flows wherever it pleases, stringing along my heart as it goes If my Love can do all of that then how can it not reach one person A person I see everyday, I touch everyday, I hear everyday The one i wish my Love could embrace with all my heart.

"I do and do not love you. Is that not happiness?" Because from what i've seen loving another and hating another both bring unhappiness Yet i know that I cannot live without love and i strive to live without hate So why not have both each countering the other Like a double negative, nothing could go wrong Right?

Today and again tomorrow i feel

**//3 Poems By//** **//Mark Jarman //**

**The Black Riviera**

There they are again. It's after dark. The rain begins its sober comedy, Slicking down their hair as they wait Under a pepper tree or eucalyptus, Larry Dietz, Luis Gonzalez, the Fitzgerald brothers, And Jarman, hidden from the cop car Sleeking innocently past. Stoned, They giggle a little, with money ready To pay for more, waiting in the rain.

They buy from the black Riviera That silently appears, as if risen, The apotheosis of wet asphalt And smeary-silvery glare And plush inner untouchability. A hand takes money and withdraws, Another extends a plastic sack-- Short, too dramatic to be questioned. What they buy is light rolled in a wave.

They send the money off in a long car A god himself could steal a girl in, Clothing its metal sheen in the spectrum Of bars and discos and restaurants. And they are left, dripping rain Under their melancholy tree, and see time Knocked akilter, sort of funny, But slowing down strangely, too. So, what do they dream?

They might dream that they are in love And wake to find they are, That outside their own pumping arteries, Which they can cargo with happiness As they sink in their little bathyspheres, Somebody else's body pressures theirs With kisses, like bursts of bloody oxygen, Until, stunned, they're dragged up, Drawn from drowning, saved.

In fact, some of us woke up that way. It has to do with how desire takes shape. Tapered, encapsulated, engineered To navigate an illusion of deep water, Its beauty has the dark roots Of a girl skipping down a high-school corridor Selling Seconal from a bag, Or a black car gliding close to the roadtop, So insular, so quiet, it enters the earth.

**My Parents Have Come Home Laughing**

My parents have come home laughing From the feast for Robert Burns, late, on foot; They have leaned against graveyard walls, Have bent double in the glittering frost, Their bladders heavy with tea and ginger. Burns, suspended in a drop, is flicked away As they wipe their eyes, and is not offended.

What could offend him? Not the squeaking bagpipe Nor the haggis which, when it was sliced, collapsed In a meal of blood and oats Nor the man who read a poem by Scott As the audience hissed embarrassment Nor the principal speaker whose topic, "Burns' View of Crop Rotation," was intended For farmers, who were not present, Nor his attempt to cover this error, reciting The only Burns poem all evening, "Nine Inch Will Please a Lady," to thickening silence.

They drop their coats in the hall, Mother first to the toilet, then Father, And then stand giggling at the phone, Debating a call to the States, decide no, And the strength to keep laughing breaks In a sigh. I hear, as their tired ribs Press together, their bedroom door not close And hear also a weeping from both of them That seems not to be pain, and it comforts me.

**Descriptions of Heaven and Hell**

The wave breaks And I'm carried into it. This is hell, I know, Yet my father laughs, Chest-deep, proving I'm wrong. We're safely rooted, Rocked on his toes.

Nothing irked him more Than asking, "What is there Beyond death?" His theory once was That love greets you, And the loveless Don't know what to say.