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Jared Pearce poems

Setting Sail

by Jared Pearce

 

She said, Honey, let’s drop it all, take
The money from our home and put it
In this fifth wheel, tour the nation,
Live on the brushing powder I’ll sell,

On the leadership lectures I’ll hawk
To cruise-line passengers. What do we need,
Besides the roof, the road, the broad
Sea releasing us from dock to dock.

He agreed and spoke positively, giving up
His bus-driving, just as he’d sundered computer
Work, forsook the walls he’d refurbished,
The wood he’d planed and paneled for her.

It may be unfair to say his eye was like
A castaway’s, a man with only one anchor.

 

 

There’s no time to lose.

 

We’ve got to hurry, she
Said, the darkest space
Hurtling past us,
If we’re to find that wayward planet.

We sheared ourselves blind,
Our antennae going berserk
For some lush haven,
A tighter gravity, a syzygy of meaning.

When her capsule docked
There was a moment she feared to remove
Her gloves and helmet, having
Traveled so far so sightless

To where time began again, clicking
Its course and dragging us with it.

 

 

Not all plants need the sun to grow.

 

She said she wanted to love me,
And then the day ripped her like a tide,
Then the night blasted her like a diabetic
Dream, then sleep held her and she loved

Darkness. She broiled herself on
The bedclothes and folded her head
Like a door that trapped me in the closet
Of the morning. She rolled this way

And that way, away and always away.
Shooting forth a root, I didn’t catch her,
And so fed only on the night, nibbling
The hush hush of her breath, hoping her
Subconscious taxi would drop me at her place
With my bouquet she’d set in a wet-brimmed vase.

 

 

BIO

Jared Pearce’s collection, The Annotated Murder of One, was released from Aubade last year (www.aubadepublishing.com/annotated-murder-of-one).  Some of his poems have recently been or will soon be shared in Adelaide, Xavier Review, Aji, Wilderness House, and Switchback.

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