John Schertzer – Drop Scenes

John Schertzer

Drop Scenes

If I knew what I meant when I said
there will be entertainment

Bricks laying bricks laying bricks

with all the sex of a thesis
scribed in the blue on the back of your hand

Why don’t you take this river from me

the confluence of fact from my fax hole
so I can spy somewhere else without flying

down the aisles along the inside of a shell

—movie theater with no sound
but a blood-rush through hollowed-out ears

Though by ten feet from the peak of violence

the hum becomes dialog
cough syrup, ergot and electric fences

designed to protect the supermarket
from shedding

its three tears: one for each matchstick

dampened along fire exits and air vents
while the players smoke in refrigeration.

*

We curved around the center arcing
in a cream of theory fizz

unfortunate as love the man
who walked the perimeter of the zoo

waiting for a waitress from an undecided past.  It added up
to not more than an ego boost

per hour, nervous-wreck machine

as even lawless she with the misty
locks undid his personality multiplex

looped through hands of devilishly uppity primal
matter scooped
out of the dashboard radio

at very little volume.  These were tastes they made
of seizing on the simplicities—

pleasures of the bedroom program
readout which they welcomed, as they

pushed away the red and homely syntax
the fragrance was finished with unless

*

I was drunk already when you called, your sweaty

faces dripping, crying when I grabbed them from a wind
barking voicelessly at the dogs next door.

They listened too long, lying beside the edge
of a blotched legal pad.  Planned to lever

up a satellite, and join together, hoping
to get back home.  But night shifted to a zoological

zone, and the wind retreated up something’s
back end.  As for me, I tried tying my heads and hands

in knots, though I couldn’t figure out how to undo it.
Morning came around earlier than usual,

surpassing any order I’d known.  Without flying off
the handle at the several witnesses on

the windowsill I climbed my hair
toward their sacred shapes, and dove into the pool.

*

Please explain: tired of the baldness leaning
between the gray and green we call a chasm

People think they’re made of blinking eyes
but more than air comes between us.  Shift

the melody this way, the quake has gone
through the broom closet and is out on the drive

I wish we were something simpler
but the windows have a history, a showing

unequaled on this floor.  Best to go
up to the seventeenth where mice are building

a city of glass and ice—numerological
interpretations of the top-forty.  All else is “story”

*

But what do you mean by beauty
The king’s been dead an hour or more
Hunting down his proxy paramour

No we haven’t established any laws
or personal details.  I squid you.
Touch-touch the oven’s off

The same with this conditioner I’m afraid
Not designed for such rugged commercial acting we were made of swirls
and other reductive miniseries-stunts

the way the cloud gathered in the wheelbarrow and we
tipped over; in a punch and scratch circus
where all our friends the annuals ignited

the flame wistful, hopeful
the way the “end of things” found
their entelechy for an hour.  Done with

their cloaks covered with thorns, they made their way
movie-like coming in pink sheets
swollen angles a little blood in their “doing-there.”