by David Weldon

north america indian song

why are you sad and why are you crying

dead land is all around you

standing on a hill

(a faceless mound of the dirt

of very old bones)

Lover’s Train

the last train

left hours ago

the last love

was on it

disappeared

into the long hard day the lost sun

gone from it yesterday

I dug up dead trees all from my backyard the skeleton branches were held together with memories forgotten

television people

t.v. men, suited and tied, their plastic hair groomed for the bright lights and the mean camera eye

tied: I’m roped and battered, beaten to your nonsense rhythm, your pounding smiles

and your machine gun tongues

youths all television headed

an empty box with no room for sorrow if I had a television head

I’d be down on my knees,

praying to the found god:

the smooth image

that I saw on the t.v.

the stark screen

betraying what’s behind it

20

Sean McQuaid

The Impulse

I feel like doing something creative!

Like, say, holing up in this castle laborato And ordering Igor to fetch me corpses, And sewing them into an unholy compos human,

And imbuing it with a twisted semblance ofl And screaming ‘“‘It’s alive”’ as the light floods its body...

Or perhaps I’ll write a poem.

Or maybe not.

There are some things man was not meat tamper with.