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David Baratier   :   four poems 
 
 

Estrella's Prophecies #47
 
Someone will consider something you do prolific
until you stop doing it. Then someone who fell
in love with your potential will leave and go
shopping. Since life hasn't been easy, it's
no wonder shopping is not your bag. To cover
the loss take up a sport which fits the stereotype
people have of people like you. People with
mercantile difficulties need to teach their inner
child to buy through visualization, which also
costs less. Replaceable things fall through your
fingers over and again until you lose them. Throw away
your isotoners this spring. In the next life larger
gloves are necessary. You have a fine mind but it
cannot be seen. Except on third Saturday of this month.
Drop another coin in the slot and I will tell more.
 
 
Mr. McFee bribes Joey's palm reader
 
You came to answer a question whose answer
should be obvious. You come from a great
nomadic heritage and will remain unhappy
unless you travel many distant lands.
The space between these lines implies
your destiny would be best determined by
reading patterns of poured colored sand
on white paper by a tribe in Arizona.
This is your intelligence which curves
upward, except here where it's disrupted
by a strong heart line matter of
love. Your lifeline indicates a long,
adventuresome existence as long as you
never see Amanda McFee again.
 
 
After school special
 
Robinson Caruso moves along the isle
in movements we each become mired in
and hence go unrecorded. At that point
during day when words fail, literary figures
come to his aid speaking unavailable
tomes. For hands like yours time's great
garbage will appear. In a quote taken
from context disappear. We only supplant
your longing with ours. There is no
point in despair, we envy your situation
and each look for something to never find
a way out of. If, after leaving the island,
we see each other on the broad sea and I
don't say hello, don't take it personal.
 
 
Ed Kopta sets the stereo on fire
 
There once was a fire who went beyond
his means and then was declared bankrupt
in the court which judged him. My friend Josh
once fought fires to save the extinct animals
themselves but not the concept. There are
those lost in well treed forests with no
intention of leaving. They have left
their day jobs and are quite happily unrecorded.
But mostly when I think of fire, I think of
Ed watching the candle samba to the speaker's
backbeat. And how the woofer moved to
the candle's light flicker and, at that moment,
well versed in chemicalogical underpinnings,
how Edward knew to unite the ununiteable.
 
 

David Baratier is the editor of Hands Collected: The Books of Simon Perchik to be released later this year. See his interview with Simon Perchik in Jacket # 8.
      Various of his own pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Red Brick Review, Jacket, Poet Lore, Slipstream, Quarter After Eight, Riverwind, Phoebe, Situation, Mirage Period(ical) #4, Logodædalus, Generator, Mass Ave, Poetry Motel, Poetry New York, Key Satch(el), and many others. He is also the founder and editor of Pavement Saw Press. A limited edition broadside was published by Oasia Press (Amman, Jordan). A Run of Letters was published in 1998 from PNY (Poetry New York) Press. These poems are from The Fall Of Because, forthcoming from Pudding House in 1999.
     
You can email them at pudding@johnstown.net

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