GEORGE CASSIDY PAYNE - POEMS

George Cassidy Payne is a poet and social worker from Rochester, New York (U.S.). His work has been featured in the Hazmat Review, MORIA Poetry Journal, Chronogram Magazine, Ampersand Literary Review, The Mindful Word, The Angle, Mojave Heart Review, Red Porch Review, Up the River, and many others. George’s blogs, essays and letters to the editor have appeared in the USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, the Havana Times, the South China Morning Post, The Buffalo News, and more. He is the proud father of two beautiful children and works full time as a domestic violence and residential family counselor in Rochester.

A Good Kiss

A good kiss smells like nectar-filled 
factories and feels like skin wrapped over 
a corpse. Erupting from long-patient seeds,
it stands still in the mouth, as eyelids move
with the vaporizing speed of a crouching cougar
at a midday spring. Shimmering ghostly white.
 
A good kiss is petite, luminous, and stingless.
Buzzing like undisturbed bees sipping from 
the edges covered with pink and emerald 
beadwork, it knows figures are keeping watch.
 
A good kiss cries with ear-splitting choruses
and senses vibrations from thunder. Scorpions
and tarantulas scuttle underfoot, and the ground
cracks apart like crawfish shells and suckling bird bones
blasted to a minimum by the sun’s motionless coil.
​

The Heart Erupting With Joy
​

​The heart is a great
disk shaped system of gas. 
A retinue of unlit planets-
a colossal swarm and a star 
simply spluttering its way through
a long series of ordinary eruptions.
 
The heart is more massive than Saturn.
A ruthless sea. Clear on any night.
Clear as Castor and Pollux.
 
Dancing in the clear moonlight
like butterflies. Dying almost as
soon as it is born, the heart
dances in groups of newborn stars.
 
The heart is a constellation.
As it steadily grills the body,
it is made of the pain reduced
to ashes. The heart contracts.
The heart takes its place in 
the interior. The heart brings
theory into line. Full. Abundant.
 
An upheaval of mountain ranges
and outbursts of volcanoes, the 
heart erupts! Nearly circular in shape
and hanging from the lowest part of the
Moon- the darkest and brightest side of
the Moon-the heart is a large globular cluster
of planets erupted from long-patient seeds. 
 
Motionless. Luminous. Scanning the darkness.
 
Tiny. Emerald. An accident by the standards
of the cosmos. The heart erupting with joy.   
 
 

A Way Out
​

​Today, the cloth of the cosmos
came undone at the seams-undone
like a bootleg Gucci handbag.
 
Today, entire continental coasts 
were consumed in a New York minute.=,
the Pope declared heaven is not real and
Saturn was sucked into the belly of a black hole.
 
Today, all semblance of order evaporated into
 the organic air of an American Spirit cigarette-
the bright yellow pack with that mild, additive free taste. 
 
Today, the ice caps melted, capitalism collapsed. and 
nothing will ever be the same again, as all Hell broke loose.
 
Today, for the first time, my son climbed out of his crib. 
 

The Cinema 
​

​Rising from the bottom of an
unfillable sink of inside space, 
the Cinema is a Mondrian; its
meanings come rushing over
hazy filters of digital luminescence:
a cosmology of sound and light,
blasting gigantic sweeping
images, like felled redwoods on
a dusky red cored forest floor.
 

Mendon Ponds
​

Life is just beginning to
dawn on most of us.
 
But that happens here quicker
than most other places.
 
Even though here, the glaciers
were lured into a dead end,
as the huge claws of time
hauled across the ground like
a long pause in someone’s
conversation, leaving shoulder humps
like a bison’s, in loosely
formed spherical organisms.
 
Here, I feel the improbability
of our connected minds.
Codes in the maple trees disguised
as art, the oughtness of an ant,
and all those obscure little
engines inside my cells.
 
Mendon…full of meandering
streaks of golden eagle wings
shrouding a teal-white glow. 
 
Mendon…pixels of maroons and
Granny Smith apple greens,
and a pond dressed in
pastels of purple mandarin.
 
Mendon… a chemical reaction to grace.
I hear sermons in your stones. 
 
 

Paddling Through Stars
​

​Have we passed
the scientific realm?
 
In the everlasting
hunt for a better
point of view, all
simple conceptions
must be abandoned.
 
All truth eliminated,
when the news comes.
 
When the news came,
the three angles of a triangle
turned into a new
order of destruction-
 
The vital break
with human welfare, 
that idea glowing in a
 cemetery
of peaceful isolation. 
 
The land is part of the water,
and we are paddling through stars.
 
 

Wild Rhubarb
​

​A kiss studied
is more beautiful
than a kiss performed.
It gives nothing away.
 
When I kiss my wife,
I should remember it.
It never was meant to be
a handshake. And why do
we kiss to say goodbye?
 
These goodbyes stretching,
crowding the horizon...
 
A sound is burned but a kiss is alive.
Alive like a moose scarfing wild rhubarb. 
 
 

Always Ringing
​

​To make the head
empty is such a heavy
thing to do.
 
For our minds are like
a set of clear buckets
hung out to gather rain.
 
And to be free of 
that distance between
our father's voice 
such an awfully close sound-
one ringing from the void.
 
 

Iraq
​

​Under the 
sand, stones
and copper cups
and teapots and 
the inescapable 
fragments of the
Wall keep watch. 
 
For once ago their 
was a ballistic weapon 
so powerful that it turned
day into night. It was the 
death of isolation, as all
things would suffer together.
 
Somewhere under the
sand there is a galactic
center made of interstellar
dust, a place where the nightly
news stalks like a beast who 
sabotages the magic trick.
 
All oracles of falsehood
under the sand, where the
temples have become soft
as bread slathered with honey.