Three Poems - Howie Good

BLAST PATTERN

Other people inhabit the house where I grew up. The country my grandparents deserted no longer exists. Chinese hermit monks regard accumulation as deficiency. That’s why cups break. I’m surrounded even in sleep by anxious objects, souvenirs overgrown with dust. A pink beam of light transmits information. The forest retreats further. Streets collapse. Oh, darken the heart, the bomb maker urges, so it doesn’t think.


ON FIRST LOOKING INTO NERUDA’S TWENTY LOVE POEMS

I was only 14
and didn’t know

what you meant.
You meant

how it blooms
hatless and in all

shades of green
and without ever

saying please.


RED CIRCUS

Step inside. Meet the strongman with the shaved head and tender heart who can quote Kafka. “It’s enough for the arrow to exactly fit the wound,” he assures the midget clown, while the bareback rider runs stumbling around the center ring after her runaway horse. And look! The lion tamer has his fist drawn back. He’s also encountered an unexpected impasse for which gun and whip are of no use. As for the ringmaster, I fade in and out like suicidal thoughts, the crying red eyes of disappearing taillights.
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BIO: Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of 18 print and digital poetry chapbooks. His full-length collection of poetry, Lovesick , was published in 2009 by Press Americana. His second full-length collection, Heart With a Dirty Windshield, will be published by BeWrite Books.