Submitted by Benjamin Gorman on February 3, 2012
I suppose it had to happen
later or sooner
given a temperament of sentiment
lacquered with cynicism
such as mine
I’ve gone and fallen in love
with Marilyn Monroe,
joined yearning millions,
her viral pheromone relayed
posthumously via digitized celluloid
(a comment on her
transcendent power
or my susceptibility?
you may well ask—
ah, I cannot judge)
As a man, of course
(we’re metal drawn from an ancient forge,
tools in service to an iterative master);
but as an actor, too:
her skills sublime
even in the narrow band they let her broadcast.
Or perhaps that was
the breadth of her repertoire; no matter—
a tune divine enraptures
as sonata or symphony.
Submitted by Benjamin Gorman on February 3, 2012
A table shows
what eyeball knows
and deeper watchers in the blood:
the days increase
and sunlight's lease
within our lives goes flood.
Two minutes more
and yet two more
now farther is the night
I stretch into
this new milieu
as daylight fills my grateful sight.
Submitted by Benjamin Gorman on February 2, 2012
Tonight’s performance
viewed from back of house:
all ahead, dead slow
verisimilitude of life (well, Shaw)
watched in Phantom Flex
No Exit made real
Icemelt action
pauses like geologic epochs
actors moving through clear gelatin
time on quaaludes
crawling into seabottom mud
and starving to death
Submitted by Benjamin Gorman on February 1, 2012
The wee hours have a certain siren call
Ulysses and his crew would surely know;
I make an easy mark and willing thrall
to hands that clutch while spinning fast and slow.
The quiet and the dark both draw me in
with promissory whispers of the world
they hold in store for those, like me, who sin
against our flesh and dare to leave sleep curled
upon its neural couch: a land of dreams
awakened; filled with treasures, ripe with joys,
where each creative enterprise redeems
the promise that its very birth employs.
How sorry am I then to learn the truth:
the promise of the night is rarely sooth.
Submitted by Benjamin Gorman on January 30, 2012
I’ve piled onto tomorrow
a heaping mound
of wishes and hopes
it would be a miracle indeed
if tomorrow ever managed to arrive
it’s buried so deep
under my expectations
burdened with my need
to redeem the loss I perceive in today
how did I come to live my life this way?
the now hocked for a vain
chance that a future now
will remake the past
into something I will accept—
will have accepted
my gerbil mind spins
this mad wheel
in quotidian, frenetic desperation
certain that one more turn
will solve the riddle
plug the hole in my wholeness
Pages
