5 Poems by Colin Dodds

(Spill-O’s Cold Afternoon)

Unshaven in his apartment.
Babbling about the infinite
because his woman left him.

Downstairs from the stars,
Spill-O opened the window,
and the voices poured in, saying

“It’s not the feelings.
A feeling could last forever.
It’s the bacteria
that eat the feelings.”

The earth burned,
the eyes above stared down hard.
And one day, in terrible pain,
he vomited up the sun.

(What the Demon Says to Spill-O)

Spill-O, like every creature, is pursued by a demon
who chases him further into his own form,
a form as impossible as a coastline,
not exactly water and not exactly land

Through long days in the suburbs of the heart,
the demon pursues him further,
his gaze lost in the spandex-lined vaginas of strange women

The demon says that this fearful eros
is just the melodramatic equivalent of a tree putting forth
a branch into an unknown patch of air,
just the expression of time through him

And from this immense
sexual, political, financial, spiritual pressure
something issues forth

like Spill-O’s hurried Irish smile,
like the esoteric scowl on the grill of a late ‘70s car,
like a song

(The Saint Spill-O Day Parade)

The men stuff their undershorts with yogurt,
pack snakes and pant legs with cream cheese,
stomp on toothpaste tubes and crush twinkies in upraised fists
until every aperture vomits

Caricatured, distorted masks of Saint Spill-O’s face
spray milk, bob down the street, leaving a smear
What Saint Spill-O meant, if he ever meant anything, is lost
to what the taxpayers required of a parade

The revelers go through their gentle mutilations,
detail pant legs with white splatters and spills,
feed cupcake frosting and ipecac to pet snakes
and fill the gutters with sour dairy

Some smartypants college kid home for the holiday
says Saint Spill-O is just a bowdlerized version
of an earlier figure, called Spill-O, or simply Spill,
the ancient patron of the inappropriate release of male seed—
both literally and in the figurative sense
of spending the best of oneself unprofitably

Spill favored the usual entrepreneurs and raconteurs
of the unrequited-love business, the poets, musicians,
artists and mystics, but grievously and unfairly defiled all others

Now Saint Spill-O Day is when people exchange
tubes of sweetened toothpaste, lick frosting from their sleeves,
eat cheese from sweatpants, sicken snakes
and pretend to pee cream

(Spill-O’s Marriott Revelation)

The electricity in Spill-O’s body turned dirty, poisonous
with coffee, ringing phones, the defibulators in airport and hotel walls,
muffled voices and staticky hold music in the air ducts

Euphemism restrained him like Zeus’ own sinews
and ambien made the Marriott strange
It seemed everyone could see the plastic bracelet
he forgot to remove when he left the astral hospital

Spill-O’s many relationships with his car keys, wallet, teeth and gut
did their cycles of loathing and forgiveness

Reeling, as was his custom, leading with his belly,
he unfurled like a sail, past the Sunglass Hut
and made an inventory of what to steal from the lobby:

A marble youth supporting a urinal
A wicker swan whose body is a spittoon
A wastepaper basket made of a god’s fingertip

“The world we seek to investigate and perhaps even love
is ruined by, and retreats from,
our outposts,” the concierge muttered

Spill-O soldiered onto his date with the moon, careful
not to vomit or break out laughing in an adulthood like
corpse practice, he floated among voices like hammers
slamming into ham, across the safety net of streetlights,
neither on the earth nor in the sky, not human nor what comes next

And in the gift shop of the finest convention hotel
of that city with no credibility, Spill-O bought a hatchet

(Spill-O’s Co(s)mic Ambitions)

At lunch, Spill-O’s friend lays out a plan
to mass-produce love and reality, he brandishes a prospectus
promising a fate apart from the masses,
ignoring the mass-produced luxury
at the end of that cynical misadventure

They are not alone
the waitress with her opera,
the security guard with his imaginary lotto millions well spent:
All pray that they are more than they seem

Spill-O has his eyes on a stranger prize
Beard and a scowl, he tries to pass for someone
too smart to ignore and too crazy to hold responsible

It’s a risky business
Just ask anyone who used to matter­—
we’re all just three bad jokes from oblivion

After lunch Spill-O and his friend
tour the city’s obstructed vistas,
play-acting their turns as the obstruction
to the upward-gazing millions