Yuri Hospodar
2 Poems
Sakhalin
The skinny time of the year,
anchored in ice
at farthest of aways,
penal island long and hard,
sentenced to sit in ocean
unheard-of and cold
humming to itself in trees
in rocks in offerings untook,
a billion minerals
and none near to say “mine”
oh Full Hands what now done
when duty beckons, gifts unseized,
and things to feed and rocks to climb
and sullen history to trim and deck
and make appealing,
and all that ice to break –
other islands yet to reach
and yank toward sun.Solo Album
The wake up call, and early morning “is”
does things with morning light never thought possible
outside of hysteric art.It’s not like there’s major label backing for any of this, you know,
and it’s best you scratch the dust off your blanketed neck
and scrape the golden goo out of the corners of your eyes,
all the better to see what’s maybe out there.When they paved over the grassy yards years ago,
how could they know it would be so much easier for
a later you to bounce from your coma bed to the street again,
still dreaming of the flowerghosts spooking the carts in the supermarket lot
so near to you, so far from its earthy past?You vant to be alone, Groucho said it like She did
inscrutably but cartoon’d like everything second-hand can be,
only he meant it and with a wiggle of his eyebrows
only Margaret Dumont failed to get the multi-leveling joke.And here you are, you Gilbert O’Sullivan song you, alone again
and refusing the parenthetical acceptance like the shy stupid romantic
you are, objecting to the concrete poems you walk on
toward the garlic ideas and wolsfbane words
you watch last century’s nocturnes screaming away from.So you’re on your own and your Socratic bed fills with hemlock memories
but your gag reflex is gone thanks to the pleasant exercise
of the benefits of fortitude and reptilian patience.
In your mind you are seventeen cheerleaders egging yourself on,
a rah-rah here, rah-rah there and the guitars churn in your gut
and the cameras roll at the sunrise and pan to you
and wait for something new to rise, to come back to the world,
to abandon the old lonely role and standard strands
holding a toy sword over your pretty little head.Sleepyhead, crinklyhead, roll with it and away from all other its,
empty address books make no phones ring,
blankets and Band-Aids and boring closed doors only keep out the air,
give up old roles that are played to Death.
The Garbo Within must be slapped away
like the dull dog bitch of darkness that it is.You’ve seen your own face;
kick away the camera, open the door.