The Storm

when it rains
streams run down asphalt
onto highway into drain

Sargasso under suburb swirls
pine needles
putrid foam

filtered at sewage plant
pumped out
beyond fishing pier into the sea

The Dream

red crabs
with snowman face and hat
scurry over kitchen table
divide into poisonous black
centipedes, split into slugs

I have a shiny butcher's knife
I cut them to pieces

The Movie

the headless usher leads me
from the morning matinee
then I follow
an arthritic man with six legs
across the sunny avenue

The Piano

mother was playing piano when I fell
among wood crates of cola bottles stacked between
refrigerator and wall in the laundry room
after the big party

she carried me screaming from the broken glass
past sandbox through a forest of schefflera
to the doctor's house next door
he took us in his gray car littered with antiseptic
cotton swabs and tongue depressors to St. Francis Hospital
on Indian Creek Drive, where the surgeon sewed me up

now when the story of scarface and 52 stitches is told,
I remember the sandbox, schefflera, and bloody swaddling
but the piano, my mother says, there never was a piano

The Prophecy

I sell rain to pine cones
and lichens
to soggy branches

drops slop off rusty gutters
roofs leak

something flashes by
that was my life

why wasn't it clearer?

© 2003 - Michael Rothenberg