John McKeown

Suburbia

Suburbia almost makes sense,
Dripping with stillness, peace
Under the rain-washed, wild, calamitous sky.

Seeming to reflect a deeper order,
A natural stability, my restless, unmortgageable
Over-heated temperament’s too thick to realize.

This is the heart of things, the good life:
A house set well back, two cars in the drive,
garden trim or self-consciously unkempt.

Then two semi-detachees conversing as I pass,
His golf’s improved with those new clubs...
Suburbia’s a graveyard, and these are it’s living dead
 

Waitress in Cafe Imperial, Prague

Her hair a seam of gold,
she persists, spreading silently
under the killing weight
of compressed circumstance.

She arranges tables, brings beer,
smiles into massed
ignorant faces, while her fingers,
ministers of her soul’s elegance

conduct concertos of beauty
unknown to her.

 John McKeown © 2008

The Hundred Years Sex War

No more than a skull
scrotum-skinned,
wisps of white hair.
But she drags him over
each and every coal,
still hot, and he submits
to the reins.

She pauses to dab
crocodile tears
in a compact.
He looks on Hell,
draws her close,
thinking to embrace
all of it.

John McKeown © 2008