COLIN DODDS - POEMS

Colin Dodds is the author of Another Broken Wizard, WINDFALL and The Last Bad Job, which Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” His writing has appeared in more than two hundred publications, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Anthology. 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.” Colin’s book-length poem That Happy Captive was a finalist for the Trio House Press Louise Bogan Award as well as the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award in 2015. And his screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in the 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. Colin lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter. See more of his work at thecolindodds.com.

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                                         Reprieves
 
 
 
Just breathing is a hanging offense
But reprieves are all around
 
Bad baptisms glow and shift
from digital jukebox coin changer
scratch-off-ticket vending machine trivia screen
devices to keep the people out of the people


The dead forgive your desires
Cheaply
The ones wise enough not to love you will answer your questions
Cheaply
 
Every man a justifiable homicide
though we’ve been advised not to think on that
Every man a justifiable homicide
and that includes you


So pause, if you must,
only to rinse
in songs and cheap light
 
Deception’s how
the heart beats and the eyes see
 
 
 
 
                                My Bother’s Keeper
 
 
 
Water
with perverse and gorgeous bother
gives itself
to itself
 
Fountains gasp and babble in dead-end streets
and open-ended piazzas
 
A family pulls creatures from the deep
interrogates and torments them
The fountain freezes the creatures in their agony
as they confess what, to them, is everything
 
To me, it’s water
 
Insignias on garbage trucks and manhole covers
display infants suckling a she-wolf
Such a calamity of maternity to found a city upon!
But why the wolf and the infants? Why a fountain at all?
Why reality at all? Why the bother? Why bother?
Am I my bother’s keeper?
 
The bother, above all, persists
 
It separates earth from dark water
in a haphazard outburst
then flees responsibility, only to turn up late
waking me from a good sleep
to help rehearse its alibi
 
 
 
                              Angels of Philadelphia
 
 
 
Skyscrapers secreted from a mechanical heaven
where the army committed miracles
prophesied commemorated or both
by the twenty-foot train-station angel hauling a corpse
the demolished stadium the marble placards in gutted banks
and William Penn’s benediction to where
his treaty partners roam no more
 
Bounded by established spirits
its angels cost more to rip out
than the square footage is worth
 
Amtrak beers cut sleeplack
from an early wakeup for menial labor
and from the outcome of a sporting event on TV
Don’t laugh, shortfalls in perspective
are all that distinguish us
 
Hurtling past lots of chewed-up cars
across from a man who’s so late he’s nearly nothing else
though it’s only 45 minutes
 
Up the line the somewhat woods
of truck docks and radio towers
house angels too I guess
poor relations with incomprehensible traditions
rumored in worm tracks under tree bark
angels who’d chew your ear off
about the morning’s cloud banks
 
The buildings beside the river abandoned
not by people but by every custom of ownership
Old friends sit on shores half-shored with broken aluminum
quietly enraged as water and time pass without regard
chuckling that every dignity left
is outsized and doomed
 
 
 
                                              Old Graverty
 
 
 
 
Who was the one who
memorized the pavement?
 
Who explained the buildings railroads canals?
Who crusted over of the fountain of reality?
Who dries the radiating deserts and waters the hanging gardens
of cascading consequence?
 
Patron of money sickness boredom
Humility’s inventor, imagination’s comeuppance
Landlord’s friend, flatfooted lucklack, hammerhead demiurge
Letter-of-the-unloved-law sonofabitch
 
You may not recognize him
But he recognizes you


He takes your complaints in stride
knowing better than any
how what passes for freedom
changes


Who divulges the curbs lanterns doorjambs
drones the don’ts and incants the can’ts?
and mumbles the caveats of graveyards and liquor stores?


Who says horizon horizon horizon
and what does he say it to ward off?
 
 
 
                              A Thousand-Year Lullaby
 
 
 
Above the asphalt and trash
wrought-iron flowers
snarl at their benefactors
 
The city:
Perturbation of nations and the spinning heavens alike
is a mere toy
by which an idiosyncratic Infinite Infant
soothes Himself
 
His wails wrest us from our greatest loves
and hardest-bought triumphs
so desperate they make us for sleep
 
Between tides of reunion and decay
amid siren chant and diesel dirge
a slovenly man murmurs a lullaby
to keep The Kid asleep
 
The conscientious dress in prayers:
That He may grow up
That He will not outgrow us
 
The world, for Him,
may be a toy
But it is almost all we have