bryan d. price
Only endurance
me reading on the patio like the mime who
can only talk with a finger in his mouth naked
painting himself no more peregrinations in a
year full of them either drunk or sleep deprived
this is my philosophy of walking off the earth
(as I have seen in some temperance propaganda)
no hospital or gospels—only endurance
Medium winter reflected in a mirror
the second son (who had been through a whole flood of hair-raising experiences) fled into mountains following the deepening mystery of an unseasonably warm Sunday no money left for bail or drugs no more eclipsed friend with fading voice and veins as opaque as sky: just avid hunters going after wild turkeys speckled as if coming out of perpetual rain
Knock at the door
affirmation or otherwise on the other side with a voice like Lee Ranaldo’s
coming through the beaded curtain not too far different from Didion’s uncanny
encounter with the world outside or the replicants come to take their revenge
on our control of nature debris flows fill the house with frogs nothing but a dry
lake bed left where we go to take pictures of other people’s pain called something
like boy with cigarette or boy with hand grenade or boy coddling eight bird eggs
folklore
I miss your tranquil voice driving thought away from thought driven to repeating phrases as frayed as magic language goes all the way down between us lays its hands on everything as light does no running from its watchful eye talking by phone and both drinking across the chasm talking about the first half of the last twenty (or so) years getting stolen from and beaten like children with plain kitchen knives you have a random urine test coming (you tell me) there’s a guy there that looks at the dick to make sure it’s not a false one and then takes you to meetings with holy rollers to disavow suicide you say slammer: the lawyer kept me out of the slammer I shouldn’t be drinking they’ll put me back in the slammer for having a Hamm’s on the phone talking to a lapsed friend about water under the bridge about eating whole chickens on Larkin Street brought out by an old woman you call Dr. Zaius for having a pronounced limp about hard cooking eggs at the YMCA hotel and then eating them with lemon pepper while listening to Alex Chilton cover The Oogum Boogum Song on the radio cumbia coming off the street below and the door man getting his brains beat in—it goes without saying that the city isn’t the same but this folklore lives inside of us
Horsemanship
saw a Susan Rothenberg painting and thought
about how I wanted to disappear into that
universe knowing nothing about horsemanship
I just found it heretical and I wanted to be inside
some timeless expression of doubt take the human
essence out of the center of everything and we
are left with a very different kernel of violence
I doubt I can go on like this for too much longer
but one day I’d like to see myself on a cave wall
running after or being chased by a beast or a
deer—a metaphor for your death cult and mine
Bryan D. Price's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Watershed Review, Posit, DMQ Review, and elsewhere. He is a part-time history instructor who lives in San Diego with his wife, a dog, and a cat named for Pina Bausch.
