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Name: Brian
Country: United States
State: Indiana
Birthday: 3/27/1980
Gender: Male
Interests: Writing, working, going to school, doodling, drawing, poetry, short stories, multitudes of music, movies made for a reason other than making money, alliteration.
email me at bmparkison@bsu.edu
Expertise: FFXI (Titan server, Islington), writing, collecting movies, Simpsons trivia....just try me...
Message: message me
Member Since:
5/2/2003
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| old Roman’s row
Roman catches fresh cut grass
thrown with damp earthworm in
the caves of his nose and his home
cue fire-engine wails and flash
as Roman, hands spread and nose pressed flat
against his epic window, breathes
and leaves in dry finger-painted font
a melting image of the spear
(Roman sows flowers in the winter,
tender poinsettias at the edge of his lawn
just past first snow near the walk
he wraps up in hysterical layers
then bundled in tight he waits-
rooted in his rocking-chair
he watches them die)
Roman hurdles his threshold’s black mat,
snagging with one hand his long, loose black coat
and absently straddling his front ditch-turned-moat
he slicks back his collar and
halts in his track
while he watches himself snarling up from the stream,
rude thick raindrops break his face and halo
out;
the smeared sky is a faucet,
Roman finds remote canals rising
quick as a sink unattended
Roman’s home lies on top of old earth
on past the gas station, a sunken corner, it
lurks, peering up, never blinking
it’s two skewed-wide eyes
as Roman boards his beaten brown beetle
low to the ground around the corner he goes
toward the cinder-block blender,
the university and fire trucks, he follows the sound
as they start to wind down, then
after seconds of silence
they pick up the downpour outside
both his doors
the dormitory’s twenty stories all out on the lawn
boxed-in, bomb squad, blue-red brown;
the sky, his eyes, the gutters backed up
and the swarm keeping warm with umbrellas and
bright coats, they cram all together
at the brink of the road, standing back from the brick-bottomed
buildings; it rains
Roman watches oceans form faster by the minute,
parked down the way playing
Suffragette City
then the firetruck moves.
Roman throws forth his
transport and
strikes
water pooled reaches half past his right tires
tickling the underbelly of his
automobile. Roman delves in a line along
the curb through the sea;
triggered tidal waves rise reaching
up for the skies like
the jaws of a great cocoa free-flowing creature
and envelop the ones in the front
and drench the ones back from that
and make obsolete nearly fifty feet of coats, umbrellas, and hats.
Roman (the birds)
boxed by radish racks on banana crates comfort
dissipates in an air of stunted,
planned escapes
a bus bench cringes, scowls and sighs
force-pinned under
Roman’s eyes, his lumpy tongue flows
from corners lobe to lobe,
his umbrella, white, tucked under one
stringy, foul arm
let me sit, his branches bray,
some fifteen stray
shopping carts standing
guard;
from Roman’s traps and trove he’s
plucked a perfect charge
this corner still sells gas caps and
back issue
tv guide.
this corner doles out
stops (Roman lets drop from each of his
hands sole, unbroken blocks)
to all it encounters, aged paper women in shawls
and striped socks
carry bags stuffed with treasure, cast off and now
found here
a blue man goes with a knee peeking out
and his shoulders,
crushed,
and his hat like a
rag,
comes a tall man, slim and sure he
watches his steps down
off the sidewalk-
flanked by billboards the building
appears propped between
poles,
topped in blackbirds, in droves,
present “The Dangers Of Smoking”
and “Be All You Can Be” both,
static,
argue and boast as the birds
man their
posts, Roman feigns toward his feet
and offers a toast
his jaws dance and he crows as he grips
in his hands both
cinderblock rocks Roman throws back his arms
in a welcoming ploy.
then swiftly, at once, a thundershot noise
shocks the lot and the customers stop,
turning uncertain eyebrows up, over, and
around. they follow the sound
to the source,
and the scorn on the corner comes rolling
them over;
the birds take their cue and blot out
the blue hue,
in a mass they make flight spilling
fright from their vast, frantic height. the sky echoes
the night when bombardment begins,
Roman flicks a thumb from his
Brillo-pad chin, unclasps his umbrella and is eaten alive
by his merciless grin
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| I NEVER remember my dreams. Maybe two, three times a year. But when i do i usually remember everything about them.
I know when someone says "let me tell you about the dream i had last night" that's usually good reason to go ahead and zone out for a few minutes (Waking Life, anyone?) but let me tell you about the dream i had last night. I was in my grandma and grandpas house (from my mothers side in case she's reading) and was with a girl, standing in the living room, which was incredibly massive...i mean it was like the living room from Scarface except it didn't look gangster. Anyway, someone else is there with us, at the other end of the room. On this end of the room the entire wall is a window...the entire wall, floor to ceiling, about 20 feet tall, crazy wide. There's a pool on the other side of the window-wall. Suddenly, two very professional looking figures appear, in suits, brandish pistols, and the man near the window yells "Go! Go now, i can hold them!" to the girl and I. They shoot the crap out of him; I hear this as i am turning, so i don't see it. We turn to run and, because this is how dreams work, we're in my grandmas kitchen, near the door that leads to a small side room that leads a) to the basement and b) outside. We go outside and begin to run across my grandma and grandpas front yard, which is still identical to the front yard of their house in real life (the gargantuan room was the only room that was some strange dream add-on) and for some reason i am not running, but galloping much like a long-legged dog would. This is odd, because i actually think, in the dream, "why don't i just stand up and run?" and decide that "this is faster anyway." The girl is running like a normal person. We round the red fence at the edge of their yard and suddenly we're at the edge of a hilly field type of area that is next to a huge body of water. At this point there's a hole in my memory about the dream. Suddenly a cream colored sedan with black tinted windows rolls by slowly on the street, the same street in front of my grandma and grandpas house. I'm frantic. I inquire "Do they drive a white car?" to which she replies "Yes." I declare that "We gotta move." She says no and pulls the grass up, like the grass you buy in rectangles that's pre-grown, except it's a massive piece of grass that's about the size of four full-sized blankets. We duck underneath and lay down on our stomachs, peeking out through the edge of the grass-blanket-hiding-spot. I repeat "We gotta move," convinced that they had seen us. She tries to reason with me by telling me that they did not see us, and that we should stay hidden. I tell her "We can get the gun off of the air compressor; it's been on all night anyway, the neighbors are probably getting a little annoyed." You see, the air compressor is floating in the huge body of water behind us (we're between the water and the road), and i know that the water is below zero and that to go after the gun-air-compressor-somehow-floating-on-water-contraption might mean freezing death. She convinces me not to go, and we wait the night out, under the grass, paralyzed with fear, watching for a cream sedan.
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| A second Roman poem is now finished, and a third is in the works. The second one is titled Roman (the birds). I've sent it off to a few places that i've had good experiences with in the past, so hopefully it gets a positive response. I'll post it tomorrow, but if it does happen to get picked up (cross your fingers, please) then i'll have to take it down for obvious reasons. Either way it was fun to create and has helped me through a tough time of no-writing, so i guess this is a win situation regardless of the outcome. | | |
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