Grips
You seem to be falling out,
like fading away, playing
fool/goof/phantom/drunken joke
to grown up little boys and girls
across sad broken south Philly homes
that chug and churn like the machines
of the past regurgitating old
memories onto old faces and wrinkles
of the mourning night too
close to sunrise to remember—
too locked in twisted horns
with dead things, meaningless things
that need to be let go— a drowning
universal truth slugging its way
at your temple—a a a—
just to let you down and you brood about
these things that can’t change
next to open window and open veins,
when you’re supposed to be the one
that lives and blazes and burns—
Incoherently I’m incoherent
137 miles in hell and away
like fading rivers pulled under heavy roads
of gray dawns—I’m connecting these thoughts
drying out—
You seem to be losing your grip
on where your reality resides—
Some Change for the Time Man
Anchor me down with the past…
I’m a floating helium-centric
goon of the heavens babbling
incoherent love songs to the sick—
oh well, it was a mighty cause
when I fought it, when I remembered
what it was, but now I’m ground
up in old groundhog day
senility starting 8 hours behind
the sun and escaping into the night
only to sleep never to live
never to live—I’m a lay about—
society bites me, keeps me moving,
I’ve fallen so far from my feet—
they’re dragging toward the gorge,
an endless plastic coffin filled
to the brim with only the faces
I’ve known, the ones with
concentric circles spinning round their
golden heads—that’d be us Joe—but
they stick the swords to our backs and the
planks vibrate to the frequency
of the queen’s machine—
there’s no footing, there’s no branch
only falling—
Tom Pescatore grew up outside Philadelphia dreaming of the endless road ahead, carrying the idea of the fabled West in his heart. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com. His work has been published in literary magazines both nationally and internationally but he’d rather have them carved on the Walt Whitman bridge or on the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row. His chapbooks Trapped in the Night and A Magical Mistake are forthcoming in 2013.
