two poems

by Brandon Shane

Dirtbag

Thirty years here, this motel

the clock stopped ticking:

I had what men kill for, tossed fifty

years downstream. Deathbed

family infertile, now the night

insects will manage the bloat:

my mistakes are all I own, half-dead

the clinic keeps calling cigarettes

need smoking kids laugh on tracks

birds kept awake by airplanes

this room cheap as shit,

and I steal consciousness

from Lorca, Gluck, Buk:

I learned the good of

boring how it can

travel the same treads

two years flipping essays

a layer of skin slugs

down my sockets

surprised us all

a lesson to tell kids

about God and a little less

about art how my heroes

are fucked and I learned

what that finally meant:

seizures gave me poetry

brought me back to it

but I am not bitter or numb,

getting older and mannered

the way some stray dogs

have forgone domesticity:

I am glad it is over

strangers now

my life is what it was before

ghosts scratch the walls:
I write poetry

crazy ones find me

we are always in love.

In lieu of Scott

Waiting for God I see

love crushed in dependency

the woman who does not leave

because her partner provides house

cares for me how she will never

care for him and I give her nothing

but words. The woman I can only love

because he gives what I cannot afford

I caress her soul and she caresses mine

the other receives what he offers

and thinks them soulmates.

The God who many believe

created us to love and praise him

this too sounds dependent.

I want to meet the woman aside

God who I can truly love

not fearing eternal violence or eternal bliss

but because nothing else matters:

I want to confess you nothing

I want you to know everything

and the only woman to ever love me

professed nightly to an inanimate man

I had her no worship stripped her icons

there were no virgin births or prophets

years of traditions and familial expectations:

love can only be mutilated

as stone churches in summer skip

along rivers where hair spills

like caterpillars defoliating ferns

some bending of light

how all staircases creak.

BIO: Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka, Japan. You can see his work in Rattle, trampset, Variant Lit, The Chiron Review, Stone Circle Review, IceFloe Press, The Marrow Poetry, One Art Poetry, Sontag Mag, Blood + Honey, Argyle Literary Magazine, among others. Find him on Twitter @HalfTheLobster and Oddlobster.com