Five Poems From Adam Strauss

Quat Rains

You’re the captain
Of team obvious—
A necessary job:
Reduces the obviating

Tendencies of the
Upper echelons, allows you
Impunity to stare
At hot blonds, consume more

Than you deserve. I’ve got
To go try and find
Agapanthus to
Walk alongside.


Demeter Whispered Die Meter!

I like
Some trees

And am
Friendly

With the
Tennis

Court Oath—
Bored on

The shelf
In a

City
You don’t

Live in:
Good for

Ya’ll come
Back now.


Nowhere But Here To Get To

My interest
Switches often—
Creates circumference

Not a constant
Center—
There’s

No bland nor time for
Jaded yet I am—
I have so many

Things and so
Few basic verbs—
Complexity fills

The interstices
Between when I’m
Ranging being or dead to

Living completely—
I like being
“Out of it” but partly

Fear this stance—
Freedom—what US
Is fighting for.


Chicks

I don’t want to read the things
I’m thinking:
Nor the script of not—what brings
Pleasure to
Many’s my goal. The dark blue
Sky vasts through
Out the window; how far is
An owl hits—
Hooks—bleeds—swifts home—hungry chicks.
The earth’s pap
Someone ruthlessly tap-taps
And I slap
Money down—night caps.


Amphora

What’s the etymology of albumen? An advanced answer is a
Question. The ocean view versus garden pondered
By someone who can afford either.
Is there a truest I in this body I’m unaware of?
I suspect an answer will be in love—lies to itself it likes sleeping—dreaming
Wagons loaded with watermelons, their flesh shot through with arsenic. Someone
Whispers in a language I didn’t know but understood, and took her to get a beer but she
Got coke and demurred to barely being there; we couldn’t talk; she bowed and left into
The third pull of my second bottle—warmer than the first but me less thirsty. A hot
Breeze quickens my emerging buzz—the sunset seems amniotic; birds chirp in
The branches of trees like people frolicking at the beach—simile as affirmation of difference;
I’m suspicious of paradox—by degrees which don’t complete a circle.
I’ve never seen one but plane trees erected my emotion. When I’ve Looked into the ocean
I’ve never thought a grave; I have felt blood runs my brain: pulses
Bob Marley’s "Stranger on the shore," littered with rubber-sandals, tennis shoes,
Lighters, Batteries, bottles.



Adam Strauss lives in Las Vegas. He adores the poetry of George Herbert and would love a career writing pop songs.