John Latta
Two poems
Kid
Pixiness in the sun-rubble,
Gangsters chucking champ goods all
Through Elysium neighborhoods, debits enter’d
In a column mark’d ‘plausible
Trouble.’ The consequence of genre
Is furniture. One way of
Maintaining dignity in stark arousal.
One way of seeing how
Measure under duress is insistence,
An unmistakable bulge. Going downtown
To scoop up something ‘rustical,
Too pointless for the city’
Or acting like a kid
With a sandwich-end teetering
Between two fingers, or half-
Way up to a mouth.
Qualms
Essence is just a quibble
With something or other, raw
Opprobrium for a trifling delinquency
Or pun, something to throw
A penny-heaven rife with
Earnests up against the yardstick
Of our appetite for naught.
To put a vogue rude
Noise to it: what I
Mean is the qualms you
Undergo — faint at the prick
Of consciousness — cut the quick
And ‘tetch the Entiretie’ of
The comprehend’d slot, there where
One’s stuff is ‘leaky Blab’
And one’s word sweetly quare.
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