RANDY PLYM - POEMS

Randy Plym is a poet and author from Virginia. He currently lives in Frankfurt, Germany, where he’s writing a novel. 

Hail poem #1, the cross-eyed take
​

​cross-eyed you came to see me
with rain drops on your eyebrows,
dawn light on your shoulders.

"you are a snowstorm,
melting on my tongue," you told me,
"the harvest moon,
where my search becomes my searching."

(your umbrella's beading)

"and you are an archipelago
where 13, 000 treasures bloom," I replied,
"Maltan gold,
dredged from the sea."

(boots knocked against the doorframe)

when hail cracks my bedroom window
and scatters over my carpet like rifle casings –
headlights stretching over charcoal.

these days, I don't stay up penning haikus
about you blushing on the stairs,
poking from your quilt like winter's first tulip.

I don't grab a broom; I just trundle to the kitchen,
pour a mug of claret, lean out the window,
and watch the morning. 
 
 

Anagram for Waste
​

​Sweat is waste, rearranged;
noting this, he hawked his oars
and let the bay carry him
the way space carries boulders.
And from his skiff, he tangoed
as neon pole-danced in raindrops
and sine waves
and sunk in clouds of cabernet;
he hummed the songs of jellyfish
and aged five years, ninety two days.

Beached now and sunburnt,
he staggers onto shore
as stars winch themselves up
from a tar-black sky,
and fog presses the moon
like a palm against a peephole.
He doesn't know the time.
He doesn't know anything at all.
He just swings
on the skeleton of a playground
that buckles at the joints and falls
and rattles like an unexpected guest.
 

On this Eve of Absolution
​

​On this eve of absolution,
a balloon twists
in the passenger window
of a rain-smeared SUV;
runnels of leaves clog the asphalt,
a semi bottoms out,
my shoes fill with evening. 

And on these dusk-ridden streets
all tensions must break;
all true stories must spill over
in the ice-flow of stratus clouds
and the syllables of streetlights.

Here even the shadows rhyme
and flicker in the beer foam
and the cans scattered like dead starlings.
I'd write them all, every trochee,
but I must walk the whole
of this lonely northern hemisphere
before I make it home.
 
 

My Ceiling Splinters
​

​my ceiling splinters
into commas and semi-colons,
iambs and dactyls,
subway lines and spider webs.

drywall snows over my coffee-table,
the cracks lengthen, wide as door-stops;
sandpipers nest in the crevices
of crawl-space, and flutter, or dive,
when the old man stomps about upstairs
(when the old man sledge-hammers plates upstairs). 

and I tell them
(how often have I told them?)
to settle the hell down
in Palm Springs or Miami Beach
if they can't stand squatting here,
with my typewriter and English ivy
and self-cleaning oven.

(sometimes I'll chuck a loafer,
or a tumbler,
just to punctuate my point).

but today, a fissure shifts; the light bulbs sag,
sandpipers run ovals around the fuchsias,
today I'll gather them, and hood them;
I'll add soma to the feeder,
I'll hold my pencil like a roost, and like a mother hen
I'll tell them:

"the beams might fracture, the structures break
muskets might thunder and gongs might quake
but sleep little sandpipers, take a big yawn
cause here, life always - always - goes on."