New work

http://www.ditchpoetry.com/connorstratman2.htm

Asylum

In so many words

you live up to your name.

Contrary lines border the heart

of this darkening discovered dusk.

And what, if I’m to blame you,

should I pack for the road?

Touch

Eros and old wounds

gather on this cigarette

butt-laden balcony

***

Someone told

me to

calm down

Love Poem

please don’t

make me kiss you

Beginning with a line from Leonard Cohen

From this broken hill

there was made a choice.

You’ve spilled chilled spirits

onto the dirt inferno

that’s built around me for years. 

Saklas

Sing, fool, sing to me,

the shadow of the centrifugal

serpent. Angel to angel,

faceless face to form

and space, come with the fire

to swing the sphere into focus.

If in our song, you’ll permit

a field to crumble into weeds,

may the oil burn at midnight

as well as at the bloody sunrise.

By then, our shirts will be dry

and the cities will call to us

in shipless drowning gestures.

They’ll know then the fixtures

were never fixed nor stern.

Your motion is your negative

gorgeous twin vision of night.

For me, the moon unhinges

on the brink of demonic dispute,

something for my six lost sons

to pull towards their barren chests. 

You Know My Name In Secret

You know my name in secret. Upon the mountain,

you called as a single dove; above all else; all burnt

with flares in your feathers. Spare my eyes, I cried,

but don’t let me look away. The blossoming clouds

sent you away. Your voice echoed through the rocks,

and my short tale ended in fear, a wretching cough

for the time in the gaping, crumbling sediment.

Then a demon shook me from sleep, his eyes

red and human, his body in the armadillo’s

shape, crawling towards me with a deafening hiss.

Almost a voice, I yelped awake and ran to check

the locks. The dead meat of the fridge was gone

by morning after I fed the hounds and sucked

down alprazolam as if that will halt a vision.

A new bird crept on the branch when sunrise

came, but I refused to look. Leaving the door

unlocked, I jumped the train with unholy wine,

hiding in a corridor deciding what crumbles:

buildings or atmospheres? Who are you?

I hear a smoking voice pawing at the door,

as if my own baptism would bring quenching

fire that no one but my fellow passengers

could see. Come near, bring water to worship,

whiskey to emulsify the acids in your knees.

Stay for the rockets on this unnamable holiday.