"Summer"

Gentle orange

resting on evening’s canopy.

From lush opaque green

like a chameleon it shifts

to the benign and melancholy

blank brown pages overlooking.

Never blinking, stoically, not a wince.

Water showers a bulwark

between the doughy field

and the grilling asphalt.

All the while your dreams

and cloud visions and games

of youth rest on the outlying

oaks that stand as the van guard.

Choruses of fouls chant,

“We live!  We die!  And yet

We live regardless!”

Quickly a raccoon darts

across the porch and into woods.

His tiny feet bearing proof

of a thousand tales

and scents of capricious wilderness.

The sweet sound of water

peaceably conquering stones.

Graham Cohen

"Place"

I am humbled by the magnitude.

Just as Caligula instills terror by way of

perversion in his uncouth world of carnality,

I tremble in awe at the lexis of the poet.

The immensity of the sharpened chasms

protruding into the depths of ethereal canyons

could all shatter and collapse at the sound

of conduction and compelling melodic sobs.

Giants were once volubly presented upon

rectangular maps of inventiveness.

But like so many magnum opuses,

they fade into the peripherality of man.

Count the soft tides, rolling upon the sands,

each one a star, erupting in life’s beautiful fury

as the child emerges while grandfather passes,

a smile warmly resting upon his understanding face.

No one can know what it will become of it, for

realms of chance are boundless.

As Hitler found numerical perfection

we find also imperfection in all.

The beauty of chaos encapsulates the

grand absurdity of the parking lot beneath.

How one deviates…

See the immaculate clouds on high,

witness the mighty tumbling horsemen

and their just Gatling guns hailing

the most consummate equalizer in all physicality.

Caress the pasty veil of patriotic cells

while they siphon through the perturbing blue,

and admire the flawlessness of their rhythm

and know, always, that everything

shall accompany everything while the

Lisbon's cliffs erode in perfect polyphony.

Stroke the sanguine fauna and recognize

its minuteness, and the beauty therin.

Colors, the only immortal being, subservient

to your desires, are true slaves.

Rub the clay pot and will forth the tower

of angelic might in smoldering gold.

Try and fail and try and fail

to recapture the glorious bland expression

that was wrought in the rediscovery

of aesthetic old men draped in purity.

Sonorously crawling through murky

flatness, bards wail of their own plight.

And all are made happy, if only for their own eternity.

Graham Cohen

Forest Fires

When did it spin out of control?

Tokyo was once enough to sustain

the voracious need for the coveted trophy.

True plugs in the levy hold,

but the great ones are forever

beings of a higher consciousness.

Run run, through the wild cold

beauty of the vast unplanned

enormity.

Drink from the Velcro bark

and eat from the mouth of Apollo.

Fill to your bullshit ends,

the great laughing berry.

Feel its intricacies as it mocks you.

Find its flaw and humble

in the stadium filled log.

Was the dance to close?

Did it break the precarious cord?

Why not?

Cretin.

Learn from your elders.

Yield to the dangers

of the unchecked  grains.

Find the thermostat and cling

to it for the dear and precious life

that Malta built for you.

Encase it in ice.

Graham Cohen

"Wasted"

My abhorrence mushrooms.

Engulfed in dullness.

Tedious and insipid.

Ostentatious red blood.

Pathetic.

Buxom fools of

orange and black.

Cool and expectant

to be detached.

Spending hours in a warp

of the fourth dimension.

And yet go nowhere.

Gain nothing.

Could they know their fall?

Could their hearts

leap up?

Could they make

the landscape their own?

A soft green breeze.

No elation equivocal

to lack of sadness

to death.

Always and simply

wasted…

-Graham Cohen

"The Time of Bells"

In the time of bells were all things sacred

and the world an endless haunted maze

of smokestacks and lightning.

Wherefore did the divine disorder relent?

Wherefore did volatility cleanse itself in

the superfluous starch of the perfect cube.

The gunslinger craves a romantic pit

in which to ravage his body and mutilate

his brethren by the profiting fire.

Did not Willie Mayes heroize the blacks?

Just as the grapes of the promised land

satiated the innate need for tenderness?

Oh odious swine, detest me not

for I am merely the miner's torch.

His soul erupts from the pavement

to the jungle upon my brow.

Upon yourself!  Your own demise

has been settled.  Voted by the parliament

of fools.  And stamped by the madman

whose reckless fist crushed the Buddah.

Millions gather to waste their youth in

the Romanesque celebration of the façade.

Hail!  Our champion emerges from mud.

Hark, come forth, and melt away the

hate with your quixotic dream.

Jubilation!  The visionary bear does

not resent.  Rather, he seeks our sympathy.

We are family.  Red dressed in black,

alike.

But all’s gone and dead.

Like the warm sun, all passed.

Cold beginning, leave me be.

You could not beg of change, for

we are too content to observe…

Or rather… to believe we observe.

Can the Robin not sing?

Cannot they ask and need and hear?

Does not the same fiery passion

burn in the furnace of their bellies?

CHAOS!

Nothing to be done…

Gogo, Dee-Dee…

I know you all too well.

-Graham Cohen

"The Space Heater"

            The alarm on her phone sounded at exactly nine AM.   Slowly, she arose and dressed herself.  He lay in bed, staring at the wall.  He let out a faux cough, perhaps simply to break the unsettling silence.  They were reticent towards one another.  Once dressed, she opened the bedroom door and turned to him.

            “I’m ready to go,” she said.

            “I’ll show you out,” he responded.

            In the front of the apartment he opened the door to the cold dampness.  A somber gray engulfed the world before them.  Slowly melting icicles hung along the railway and here and there one would break off and shatter on the paved walkway.  They said goodbye, nothing more, as she stepped into the slush and trudged towards her car.  It was the first time since they had met nearly a month that they had parted ways without so much as kissing each other.  He gazed, stone faced, as she disappeared around the corner of his apartment building and he pondered how the affection between the two of them could have diminished so quickly.

            He returned to his warm bedroom.  The space heater reverberated a calming ambient hum.  He lay back in his bed and reflected on the weeks gone by.

            “Things changed so quickly,” he thought.

            He promptly recounted each of the occurrences that had led up to this point.  Each tryst, each grilled cheese the morning after, each vodka tonic that they had shared.  He recalled how she had chosen him, of all her suitors that night that they first met.  How she entrusted him with her intimacies and secrets.  How she was comfortable around him.  She had made him feel proud of himself.

            One relic he quickly noticed that she had left behind was her scent.  It dwelled in his bed where she had lain.  It was an effortlessly sweet aura complemented by a subtle winter sting.  It was an amorous fragrance, provocative yet soothing.  It gave their time together an even greater halcyon quality.  Smelling it induced a revelation that slightly frightened him, he missed her.  Or, more specifically, he missed her presence.  Though young, he had spent the entirety of his existence sans romance.  He had pursued it, of course.  But each time it was to no avail.  He knew what it meant to be in love, he even knew the sensation of naked exposure that germinated from the embarrassment of rejection.  But he didn’t know what it meant to prosper.  He wondered if that was why he had been so quick to espouse their partnership.

            “Have I wronged her?  Was I misleading?”

            These and thousands of other questions and musings clouded his mind.  He recounted every word of the dialogue their first night together.  He had told her that he didn’t want a girlfriend.  His studies at the university and his job at the bistro took up too much of his time.  When the semester began anew, he would be virtually unreachable.  He wouldn’t be able to offer enough and it would be unfair to her.  It didn’t bother her, she felt and candidly spoke the same way.  Besides, she was to soon study abroad.  They were each careful to never refer to one another as “boyfriend,” or “girlfriend.”  However, they remained faithful to one another, never sleeping with anyone else, confiding in each other, and scrupulous to always make time for the other.  This was the foundation for their affair.  It was to be empty, but it was an honest emptiness.  This honesty led to his decision.  He could sense that what was between them had grown and changed.  They were violating their agreement.  They were beginning to care too much for one another.  Their mutual fondness had reached a dangerous level of affinity.  He felt that he had no choice in the matter, he ended it.

            He didn’t mind that she wished to stay for one last night, if only to silently console themselves through embracement.  It was unspoken that that was what they both desired.  It was the most dejecting night of their lives.  He held her tight as she quietly wept into his shoulder and he struggled not to forlornly break down and follow suit.  Upon her concurrence with his decision, and a request to stay the night, they said nothing to each other.  Not until the morning when she left.

            He lay there, coming to terms with the blunt fact that he wouldn’t see her for a long time, if ever again.  He was sure he would miss her, but it was a pain he knew he could weather.  It would only be a fraction of the suffering that they would both be subjected to, should they have continued.  He knew she didn’t want things to be finished.  But she cared for him enough to release him.  He finally understood what it meant to hurt someone.  He finally knew the abhorrent guilt that burdened one who truly grieved another.  To grieve another that he had come to care for immensely.  He reached out to lay his hand on her pillow.

            The space heater ceased to hum.  The room was silent and static.  He was alone.

-Graham Cohen

"Innocuous"

            Good enough, I suppose.  Size D, roughly.  But a lot of it is fat, deceptive.  Okay, it’s okay, this is okay.  God didn’t say anything.  How do you wanna do this, I ask her.  You come over, I blow you, you leave, she says.  I’ll be there in twenty minutes, I say.  I close the computer and head out.  My car is cold and I need gas.  Fuck, I’m not really doing this.  It’s three A.M.  I’ll just drive to the burger joint instead.  I don’t.

            I pull right into the gas station and start filling up.  Jesus fucking Christ, I’m not really doing this.  Look at that guy smoking a cigarette over there by the big rig.  He has a job.  How the fuck could anyone do this in a world where people have jobs?  He does things, not this.  He moves the world, what do I do?  He belongs to me.

            No one does this.  No one but politicians and priests.  Maybe they’ll put me on the news.  Maybe I’ll be disowned by my family.  Maybe I’ll kill her.  I’m god.  My car fills and I leave.  What’s the coolest way to die?  Starting a fight with more crocodiles than you know you can defeat.  That’s a good one.  Driving a 64 mustang into the grand canyon, pounding back bourbon and firing off a six-shooter.  Not bad, not bad.

            The directions she gave me navigate me through the woods off the main road.  Through it, a beacon of Rome; a shit-brick colored apartment complex.  I beam blankly at the window as the light flicks on and off.  She had told me to come to the back.  I reach to knock, the main door opens before I can.  A garbage bag covers the entry.

            It breathes heavily.  God, does it breathe heavily.  Like it’s angry, like it’s gonna eat me.  It must have heard me thinking.  It pops its finger through a hole around the waist and wiggles it around.  I reach out to wrap my finger around it.  I embrace it and stroke it with my thumb like it’s my own daughter’s.  It withdraws, frustrated.  It returns and authoritatively points then retreats.  No way, it’s probably waiting with a nail gun.  I’m just a number to it.

            “You want me to slide it in there?”

            It smashes something and breathes heavier.  Grunting.  The finger reappears, grabs me, leaves.  I’ll die.  Someday.  I’ll do it, fuck it.

            “No.”

            The door slams shut.  I smoke a cigarette beside my car before I get back in.  I gaze at the window, I know it’s staring back at me.  Maybe it’s Grendel.  I don’t know a lot.  That finger, Christ of all fucks, that finger.  Like the scaly nape of a python.  But chunkier.  I get into my car and start driving west.

-Graham Cohen