Two new poems: life in laundry loads & Nightsense
Here are two new poems. More writing soon, including a new novel chapter. Interested in feedback/comments about these. Injoy.
life in laundry loads
Sometimes the cure for loneliness
is to become still and watch,
to become still and listen.
dissolve invisibility
merge with the visible,
join with others through the power of sight.
*
What will happen in this time
measured in laundry loads?
what will fill the twenty-nine minutes of waiting
to change from wash to dry
in a parking lot
on this empty, late-night city Sunday?
The laundromat is framed in the rearview mirror.
All glass windows and glaring light,
an aquarium full of tired, bustling life and resignation.
The busy street is still humming at One A.M. .
Across the street is a strip mall,
where next door to Karate-Mart
is another windowed storefront filled with fluorescence
The stage is set, the white room empty
until a ropy shirtless man enters tidying up the Dojo.
Mundane tasks: folding up wrestling mats, the moving of a table,
are punctuated by explosive Karate sequences.
As if the fourth wall has been broken
as if allowed into the ant farm.
The man cleans a window with intent
and suddenly kicks the shit out of an invisible adversary
moves not for the benefit of the street
or the towering black teen
sitting on the wall of the laundry parking lot,
three-quarters torso,
folding flesh falling out of his wifebeater,
white shoes and socks glowing in false moonlight.
*
How many times in twenty-nine minutes will the light change?
How many times will the pulley on the rope the flag hangs from
clang against the flagpole in some breeze-based Morse code?
How many grown men on BMX bikes will cycle past in a sad Sunday night parade?
How many loads of wet laundry will be pulled out,
bear hugged and lugged over to industrial dryers?
(The wall mounted dryers appropriately branded “Speed Queen”)
How many moves will the shirtless man bust out in his lonely, glowing Dojo?
How many souls will pass by in cars, on foot, on bikes, on medical scooters?
Where do they all come from?
Where is this sad Sunday night parade going?
Jonathan Bond © 2013
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Nightsense
The night smelled of:
laundry soap and black licorice.
onion rings and electrical tape
elderberries and feet.
the night air smelled of:
silence and soft noodles
bald heads and optimism
entropy and bowling balls.
the night air smelled of:
re-birth and watermelon wine
bird feathers and falling down
eyelets and rhubarb.
it smelled of all these
but tasted like a cold knife.
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