4 poems by Sam Silva

BLISS

Mindless piano trills from the online station
…bright lights!, they might flicker to a migraine
while a mind on the other side of me
desires something else
of the near to swallowed pain medication

…peace and pleasure!…the stalwarts of the sixties!
…what survives if anything
of a long ago burned out generation
of values
seeking to kiss the sky

in a Hendrix lullaby!

MONSTERS OF MODERNITY

Snot face!, with his beagle eyes behind glasses
knows that the secret to success
is to eliminate
controls on money
of any sort.

One measures accomplishment
in this sort of system
by the way that cash and credit accrue
and bolster poll results
with unlimited advertising

…the snakes have crawled out from under a rock
…good Christian women buy them for their skins
…expensive call girls stroke them to docility

They realistically assess this world!
They sniff the bitch and pull the engine!
They are poles on which workers are taught to pin flags!

So we jerk them at every patriotic movie!
So we get piss full of beer and enthusiastically exude our poison!
…hoping to die of that poison in some white out end.

Oh children it is time to fall asleep
and turn all of nature to a happy cartoon
and disappear down a rabbit hole
hoping to forever avoid that nightmare
…the other side
of the looking glass.

POEMS IN A VARMINT TRAP

Teeth which drop and balding shaggy scraps of hair
as if glued
to the aperture of a vacant head
full of the winds
and other forms of violent air.

Gases and a nap!
Poems in a varmint trap
just behind the barrels full of trash.

Cigarettes and ash!
Nicorettes and crap!
And a rotting mind which smokes a pipe
focusing on the abstract life
with every salient breath.

These things are cheap!, requiring little cash
to spend along a path
which leads to death.

WHERE ALL OF THE WORDS COME FROM

How did I find a woman so full of her own blushing passion?
I found her art…understated and graceful
but with all of the colors of an innocent genius.

Stammer through the galleries we have made!
The rooms full of abstracted fish
and cubist collage of sexual encounter
…and a bird so pure in laughing parrot excess
as to draw
the soul in
on winds of blue and pink.

The little thoughts I think
as the mind meanders
past paintings so original
or borrowed
or stolen from the gypsy wind

and out through a picture window
to the leaves of every season
and its meaning

for my life.