Paul Stevens

The suicide bomber who loved me

I am the wide eyed dreamer on

the table of the elements,

whose provenance

gutters as a ribald candle

pinging empty code across

volumes of encrypted hair,

or seaweed swung by wireless

resin burnt to virtual

extraordinary rendition.

You have sole-authored me

with your ehanced interrogation of

my hard core poetry,

and I will wear the orange jump suit,

the leather hoods and cuffs

all our days, no habeus

to limit or confine my corpus

delecti and dna.

Valency and ultra violet,

stark in your spectrometer,

wash insurgent stellar tides,

towers tumbling, mahdis rising,

tanks in checkerboard formation,

collateral locust-clouds of dust

shot through with lost american idols

in the Walmart of emotions. Springer

liberates us: dance and offer

flowers: the dictator’s dead,

all the deserts freaked with shreds

and whisps of plastic sheeting, queer

or straight or just arriving.

Ride the L inhale the anthrax,

strange fruit strapped against your breast;

press the martyr button now:

your pelvis dopplered into redshift light

righteous, lazy flower-burst—

Paul Stevens © 2009

Gargoyle

He crouches on the rim of the bath, pink feet

Flopped across the enamel edge, gargoyle

Face grinning down towards the suds and flesh.

Lines of light vector from his grimace

Towards her isle of foamy bush, risen

Fresh from the steaming, tame Sargasso Sea.

What murderous radiance leaks away from his smile?

What virginal pleasure beams in the stretch of his leer?

Violins drag arpeggios out from the tiles.

The water, plucked to pizzicato peaks,

Shimmies against her body's littoral.

Paul Stevens © 2009