poetry found a living room



Ross William Hamilton, The Oregonian



sharpening knives with no reservations, the teacher anoints the teacher's fountain with righteous words as the painter tapes the plastic down. a couple ascend the stone stairway to the parking lot’s rooftop performance of dusk in july is an egg broken high above a concrete bowl and we are it's audience, dazzled by fading shine. the past arrives without a past, passing like a train that won't slow down as the dusty old salesman with his too translated book scurries by in his pinstriped suit, carrying the world on his back. isn't everything done and said, instead? the singer never asks. cartoons of diversity panel the plywood covered walkway downtown, the unaffordable and undesirable never sit & sip, together or still. out of the corner of my lazy eye, a handsome japanese couple tag team their toddler's pants off, replaced with swim trunks for the wading pool, where the unfortunate city slurps it's colors scraped on black square plates, giving the music color he says, the various feeling of the poets dictates to the painter, who declares all reasonable offers will be refused. i see we are stalked by fingerprinted skin like predator reconsidering our boundaries. the plastic chain stand collapses from the force of the painter's brute sincerity, slash & gash, he dabs the waiting mouths of distinct color as the wind stripes ripples across the moist eye of the reclining cyclops, and pigeons swoop the bowl where we sit pondering all that you, all that you scraped across your life, just to tease the eye with texture. he confesses his fandom with borrowed lines as hysterical preteen girls scream in swimsuits re-enacting the horror films they shouldn't have stayed up for the man who hasn't been able to sleep on anything soft in years does not really know the woman he sleeps with. the painter conjures with a swipe of his hand, and just like that, an emerald comet appears as the train wheezes past again with its icecream cone sigh, like an elderly star too tired to shoot, dragging itself in shame beneath its sky. an adolescent girl in denim shorts, worn over black lace stockings, florid with roses,  drags a chair into the center of the pool where sits, posing like a star jealous of our moon. delicacies or dry mouth delirium is no choice at all, cornered shadows saturated in shiny silences, slipping like spaghetti straps off a shoulder of sheer brick and we have been discovered by wind as they, the children run again into the pool to discuss the rules of their improvised play. no singer has ever been fired for moaning too many baby's he thinks, these towers of stone interrupted with predictable blinks of glass have all gotten jesus turned the other cheek. wind ripped what it could from the backs of our kneeling skeletons, assembled to expose like warm bellies giving themselves to the sherbet sun. waving goodbye, i feel the evening creeping with its delicate cool, menacing the small game of our affection. time to leave; i have a job to do, stapling the neighborhood with posters of regret.

http://www.portlandonline.com/parks/index.cfm?c=52454