Ryan Downey
2 poems
**
Skin
A train quilt. That is, a panel with a train moving westward. Pick me up by my bootstraps and bitch-slap my tear stained face. We must protect this house from angry athletes. Rorschach my upper extremities with your evangelical hatred. Spittle forming a steady pool in your chin divot, you hand me your resignation. Don't you hate when people read personal notes aloud? Pick up those boots. Train-scuff, the most serious kind. Quilt-less sleep.
**
from Shapes of Perfect, Hollow Ring
We are a collection of circles.
Someone says don't question your instinct.
Someone wears a chiffon hair ribbon and Teflon-
-coated pants and slides down fully enclosed
life-sized straws into someone's miniature
and less than lifelike (somehow) someone.
One of the circles has two smaller circles
facing each other on opposite sides
of the prime meridian. Solar rexus.
And when the three circles are faced
with fake words, (see S. Rexus), they
make another circle and their perimeters
tremble uncontrollably at a rapid pace.
A child stares out the porthole of a passenger jet.
Below him he sees an interminable pattern
that looks like circles and squares or happiness
or a plastic toy plane guided by his television hand
under a bridge or around a windmill with colorful
panes generating electricity or amusement and then
it hits him, Skyman, not the boy (his forehead smooth)
that the circles stacked on top of each other are:
1.......a super-life-sized straw to bury oneself in
2.......through the magic of distance and perception,
.....a disjointed spiral
Skyman confuses disjointed with detached and thinks:
The loneliness of circles. The man in the moon.
The sun looked directly at me for 7 minutes and 40 seconds
and then turned away for eighteen months,
the man in the moon says softly into the receiver.
On the other end, Skyman is making silky eyes
at the sun and fondling a rainbow with his corpulent
white fingers.
Skyman swallows a plane in one gulp
and hangs up the phone. Skyman screams
remembering those 7 minutes 40 seconds
when his body was jetty and disappeared
into an archive of circle minds. His Puffy
hands toss semi-circles into the magic
eye-scape below. Skyman sees someone in
the pixilated water. The perception dims.
**
return to sawbuck 1.9
**
Ryan Downey lives in Athens, Georgia with his cat Sparksy. He has placed poems in elimae, Kulture Vulture, Word Riot, The Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Death Metal Poetry.
**
Skin
A train quilt. That is, a panel with a train moving westward. Pick me up by my bootstraps and bitch-slap my tear stained face. We must protect this house from angry athletes. Rorschach my upper extremities with your evangelical hatred. Spittle forming a steady pool in your chin divot, you hand me your resignation. Don't you hate when people read personal notes aloud? Pick up those boots. Train-scuff, the most serious kind. Quilt-less sleep.
**
from Shapes of Perfect, Hollow Ring
We are a collection of circles.
Someone says don't question your instinct.
Someone wears a chiffon hair ribbon and Teflon-
-coated pants and slides down fully enclosed
life-sized straws into someone's miniature
and less than lifelike (somehow) someone.
One of the circles has two smaller circles
facing each other on opposite sides
of the prime meridian. Solar rexus.
And when the three circles are faced
with fake words, (see S. Rexus), they
make another circle and their perimeters
tremble uncontrollably at a rapid pace.
A child stares out the porthole of a passenger jet.
Below him he sees an interminable pattern
that looks like circles and squares or happiness
or a plastic toy plane guided by his television hand
under a bridge or around a windmill with colorful
panes generating electricity or amusement and then
it hits him, Skyman, not the boy (his forehead smooth)
that the circles stacked on top of each other are:
1.......a super-life-sized straw to bury oneself in
2.......through the magic of distance and perception,
.....a disjointed spiral
Skyman confuses disjointed with detached and thinks:
The loneliness of circles. The man in the moon.
The sun looked directly at me for 7 minutes and 40 seconds
and then turned away for eighteen months,
the man in the moon says softly into the receiver.
On the other end, Skyman is making silky eyes
at the sun and fondling a rainbow with his corpulent
white fingers.
Skyman swallows a plane in one gulp
and hangs up the phone. Skyman screams
remembering those 7 minutes 40 seconds
when his body was jetty and disappeared
into an archive of circle minds. His Puffy
hands toss semi-circles into the magic
eye-scape below. Skyman sees someone in
the pixilated water. The perception dims.
**
return to sawbuck 1.9
**
Ryan Downey lives in Athens, Georgia with his cat Sparksy. He has placed poems in elimae, Kulture Vulture, Word Riot, The Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Death Metal Poetry.
