MARK DECARTERET

JESUS CAN'T KEEP UP WITH MY SINS IN HIS SANDALS

Another star is ushered off the store’s velvet display.

That would make eleven.  Or twelve if we toss in the plane

that's long sought to eavesdrop on the heavens.

Most of what half-fazes us happens well over our heads.

Oh, what a push it all is.  What a lowering of trust.

I plead that you remove everything in the log up till now

when I’ll try to gaze out with more gravity, leverage.

No, no, no--shushing the dog doesn’t do any good at all.

On the way down the stairs I will still rough up its fur

and point out those gums as black as turned fruit,

how it struts towards the entryway turf then attacks it.

An agent’s radio tags the back wall but never dares a follow-up. 

Even my touch is a kind of evasion, cutback in feeling.

I’ve been left to that self I have fled since the casino arrest.  

The sky’s turning toy gun gray.  Ask again, rag-burnished.

And the clouds have that same disarmingly rigged look as the hills.

I was saved the same amount of times by your God as mine.

How useless death’s been to me.  Go ahead, time us.   

TAHOMA

The same ad for dawn again.  How I’ve mastered

its theme song but not the game show that follows.

One day I will wake without any knack for words,

ransoming canned ones in some random order.

Sad, how the littler the heart the less easy it’s tamed,

how the mind will go dim when we need it the most.

So I’ll lip-synch another April still unripe on the page,

sounding its peeled skin into pyres to be lit.

Anything not solid is at a loss, given to the smoke

that rises in off-white drifts, those poor comatose souls.

If you must purge please purge as a group I tell myself.

For only our fingernails are left to grin and/or define

irony for those who pick up on these type of things.

Yes, light has fallen.  Targeting the power lines, pine trees.

What isn’t gray will be torn up into rags.

Even the shell-glint and leg-splints of pigeons,

the clouds secretly miked for their off-color asides. 

We standardized snow for this reason alone--

tired of it lounging around in its underwear, ever-sighing.

Sorry for this interruption.  We’ll now return you to your poem.

Listen though and you might hear where I’ve been fooling

around with my first metaphor, grafting tedium to sun,

trading this most earnest of fonts for something aloof.

BIO

MARK DECARTERET has met up with some lit-luck as of late at BlazeVOX, coconut, Confrontation, Gargoyle, Hunger Mountain, Spillway, St. Petersburg Review, THRUSH, Toad Suck Review, Welter, and Whole Beast Rag.