Loneliness Grows Stranger the Larger It Becomes
by Colin Dodds
We brought food to their lips. But they would not eat.
We implored them with prayer and self-flagellation.
But they would not be moved.
We blasphemed to the limits of our imaginations.
But they would not raise their hands or voices against us.
Still we fed, praised and cursed them.
Until, with an atom bomb to deflect creation’s question,
we left that home.
Secrets of the Modern Race
My tribe held a gun
to the head of the world,
only to learn
that you can’t just laugh off
something like that.
Babies find it strange
to be born among us.
The TVs fill with fantasies
about institutionalized cannibalism.
And even the billboards concede
that the primordial trust has been broken
in the worst possible way.
The shape of that catastrophe
worry the men all day
and give them erections at night.
“How are we supposed
to get excited, to glow,
unless people are maimed and killed?”
asks everyone, in or near a movie, now showing
all the time.
The ancient processes are short-circuited.
Certain extreme measures unveil themselves.
The urgent center expands,
takes the newspaper as its skin.
Room Without End
The endless room flickers.
Its lightning is line charts and its thunder is poverty.
The endless room makes men and women
equivocal as anthropologists’ apologists,
even in the privacy of their own hearts.
You can do alright here for awhile.
But you’ll never beat the dead man in charge.
BIO
Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City. His poetry has appeared in more than a hundred fifty publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. The poet and songwriter David Berman (Silver Jews, Actual Air) said of Dodds’ work: “These are very good poems. For moments I could even feel the old feelings when I read them.” Dodds is also the author of several novels, including WINDFALL and The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” And his screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in the 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. Colin lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha. You can find more of his work at thecolindodds.com
