lightening tastes like gangs
lightening tastes like gangs
by travis catsull
oh
my world of passwords
what will you do to help me
pay the water bill?
earlier today i got an email
from my local autoparts store
and felt
somehow
they had crossed the line
after i walk two miles into the woods
i sit down
i pretend i am there
with old Nine Pipe
he tells me a joke about two blackbirds
i throw the ball through the park air
listening to the water from some pipe
while jumping up the bone wind
and i stretch canvass
and i stretch my arms
to measure out how
much i love you
winter slowly
finds its way to texas
i know
because the steel beak of the blackbirds
chuckle back into their meals and funny jokes
i think its important you know
that no one ever finds out
what it is you pray for
my eyes got a hundred cop cars
just driving ’round in em
in my shoe
i hide a golden chickpea
that i assume could pay my way
across a rainforest
to where the letters to jesus are kept
just there
in several bunkers
sent over
with my passwords
and your passwords
the passwords we no longer use
kept there
waiting for us to come and get them
waiting for us to die
so they too
can move on
©
Cutting alloy trysts sumptuous utensil leading linear…
Ironic that in a world of passwords many are resorting to ‘one for all’. Autozone or O’Reileys?
But yeah, stormy dao of the many colored poet’s spectacles…like one of those pens with 5 clicking colors…there are so many perspectives from which to poemize. I felt the poem transitioning in unpredictable hence stimulating directions (even becoming a love poem a one point)coming back on itself with water [from the lightning storm] and nature [the ultimate inspirerer of interconnectedness into that initiation of the earthly gang (amazing how individualism takes us there)].
“i think it’s important you know that no one ever finds out what it is you pray for”. Something to ponder. I do a route in a Mack truck and do a lot of driving and have come upon ‘markers’ or ‘pyres’ along the roadside where someone presumably died in a wreck. Strangley, i’ve began praying for the dead that they are in comfort in whatever Aleysian Fields they may dwell. And of course, whatever nighttime animal i cannot avoid that they may recover in some woody glade. Shit! I just broke the rule.
Symbolism of passwords (or duality of meaning) towards end of poem really brings it together and marinates me in that broth called life. And I’m impressed that you’ve managed to do something i’ve never accomplished…writing good poetry without use of innuendo or mention of wild sex. Perhaps lightning can strike twice in the same place.