Cheerful poems

Cheerful poems — a collection of the best works on Poemship.

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Dave Bonta

Ice king

bitter cold weather again and me with a silver head and a stone in my mouth no porridge no pork nobody I love but a hundred stories and how absurd to be king for half an hour

Dave Bonta

Parliament of fools

a parliament with a pen is a parliament of paper an ow comes out of each owe how to think with no ink

Dave Bonta

We were just talking about you crooked tunnel the way you funnel your long freight up the walnut tree serpent & glide out along one diminishing limb until you reach the roof drop into the gutter & loop into a squirrel hole above the kitchen We’d just found one of your old skins snagged on a thorn I don’t think he’s coming back for it I joked And my neighbor glances up into the tree & says Well there he is now And there you were son of a bitch still & heavy as a tongue with bad news waiting for a signal neither of us caught to set you back into motion into path into limbless dragon flicking your soft Y of flame

Dave Bonta

Livestock

Enormous oak the daylight moon in its branches a goat at its foot Holstein with a heart in the middle of her forehead loves the salt lick Horses in the shade of a weeping willow a cascade of piss

Dave Bonta

New Year round

first sunrise of the year the orange bellies of the clouds are blurry with snow a gray squirrel in estrus trailed by two slow-motion suitors in the wind above the ridge a raven croaks & somersaults my first piss of the New Year I’m especially careful distant rumble of a military jet it’s still the same world windows rattle with the snoring of a late-night reveler I clear the cookies

Dave Bonta

A Bigfoot poem

would have nothing whatsoever to do with, you know — those interlopers. It would have, I suppose, a cold mountain stream in it, a rock shifting in the current, the too-loud splash of a trout. It would have loose bark ticking in the wind & a saw-whet owl’s discrete requests for clarification — that kind of persistence. It would have the hush when the crickets suddenly stop & your pulse makes such a racket you’re sure it will give you away, you whose knees

Dave Bonta

Jersey Shore

the shore is a kind of road that leads only to itself the sound of its traffic is said to be soothing its sand grains attract hourglass figures we bury each other up to the neck gulls & gamblers take turns screaming at the sun we eat white sandwiches & colored ice there are rides no one has ever dared get off of there are entire hotels patronized only by crabs

Dave Bonta

Gibbous

Shameless procrastinator, ragged tooth unsullied by the dawn. Full, you went to bed on time; a quarter empty & you never act your age. Hasp with no padlock, no wonder the night got away! Old flat tire. As if my poet’s O were set in gothic.

Dave Bonta

Enormous letters: haiku

The letters suddenly look enormous — ant on the keypad Fireworks from the valley blossom at eye-level — the smell of gunpowder My desk lamp has acquired a curtain of beads: white spiderlings Coffee just poured, I rinse the pot & find a live firefly

Dave Bonta

Circus Reject

What can you do, he asks. I can recite pi, I tell him, to one thousand places. Blindfold me — I can find & identify flying objects better than a bat. I don’t merely eat fire; I excrete it. I can go for years without sleep. But he only wants to know how much I drink — as if I ran away from my life & came all this way just to pound stakes & shovel elephant dung like some lousy roustabout. Your loss, I say to his back, & shuffle

Dave Bonta

Skunk Cabbage

Symplocarpus foetidus Here’s to the skunk cabbage, first plant to raise a toast to spring, even if it sometimes has to melt a hole right through the ice, a plant that grows its own hothouse & keeps it at 22 degrees Celsius for weeks on end. Half monk, half cobra, it shares its solitude with the earliest flies & beetles, whose springtime fancy turns to putrefaction: gut piles, winter-killed deer, & in the swamp a leathery curl of old meat.

Dave Bonta

SKETCH FOR A STILL LIFE WITH SAXOPHONE

What a quaint notion–that life could be anything but kinetic, frenetic, in full swing! But let’s have a galvanized steel bucket of ice sent up & see what happens. Something to shine, to gleam. And a wooden bowl of felt- &-plastic fruit on a low table. And for the proper contrast, for corners appropriately dark, Japan’s the place: the traditional-style half of a hotel suite, say, in a seaside resort just beginning to fall

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