Enter Home Planet News Poetry of Issue #4                        Page 37
                                   
Table of
Contents



Conversation with a Dying Woman

I’m sorry
I was so mean to you yesterday
when you came to my bedside

but you were smoking a pipe
and your face
wasn’t your face

so I got scared
and said mean things to you.

Maybe it was all just a dream
but I don’t think so

because I remember
other portions of our conversation
so vividly—

especially the part where I told you
that we are not creatures
with souls

but instead
we’re souls with people
just barely attached

and you said
you loved that idea
and would put it in a poem
someday.

Richard King Perkins II __

The Last Rays of the Sun

Pastel outcrops
dusted in macabre glow

and the lute
of a diabolical bird—

you were born
in a lascivious position

a consequence of your creation,
the original state of matter

and you’re my punishment
for lust and gluttony.

My kisses cause strawberries
to rise from your body

as light penetrates your pigment,
blending affections.

We’re attracted to the idea
of infinity—

the last rays of the sun,
a lurid rift

accentuated by the edge
of night’s profane—

a gilded chandelier,
irredeemably risen.


        Richard King Perkins II__



Bayonets of Morning


With muted amber lament
somehow I have lost your image
in lowest clouds

where the bones of complacent mountains
cling to the first bayonets of morning.

Ungrasp with difficulty the ebony fire of sunlight
and arrange diagonally the bodies of weed—

the ground gives silent warmth;
stagnation in yellow, subdued castings

brittle blacks of yestertime
circle and release

in fields that harmonize and weep.

Yet the bloodflow of your form
is a luminous crest of plumage
almost within reach of my embrace

and if offered the choice of infinity
in the barest fraction of all that is possible

I’d ask only for the simplest understandable
good-bye.



        Richard King Perkins II__
Antique and Collectible Mall


Stealing from family and acquaintances

here come the heroin kids—
just out of high school

bringing the best merchandise to sell:

Victoriana, gold jewelry,
original carded Star Wars figures

but I reluctantly have to pass on the Tiffany lamp
because it’s probably intimately photographed

with a separate insurance rider.

Sometimes the addicted young women

show up with nothing to sell
except their mouths
which I also pass on

because they guys have mentioned
more than once
that the girls are all HIV positive

from the rich Iranian dude who owns the trailer park.

Twenty years later
I sometimes wonder about those poor tortured souls
having seen the faces of addiction in so many forms.

Like an overburdened simian,
I’m compelled to climb a ladder to my attic
once a month

to light up a shade
of hand painted blacked-eyed susans
on mosaic glass

which I finally just had to buy
from a gaunt young woman for two hundred bucks.

I should have passed on the hand job
but she threw that in for free.



        Richard King Perkins II__