Peter Orlovsky

8 July 1933 - 30 May 2010

New Poems From Richard Cronshey

Politics

Night sky
you keep
smoking
up your sleeve,

a bad kind
of unearthly;
a burning
worn by air.

...

Conflagration,
our transparent
address.

I bury
my name
to the quick
in your name.

.....

By the embrace
my life disguises,

Cinder and prism
hoodwinked unto death.


Practice

Our Lady of The Razor Wire,
Wounds luring wounds
along the slaggy gallows path.

Our injuries
make us rattle,

like dancing.

Who am I anyway
compared to your heartbreak
That is so big
you have disappeared
altogether in it
and become ransom for specters?


Calamitous shadow
histories
I live out
Invoked by our starved tautology.

The left hand undoes
what the right hand is doing.


Swim upriver
away from my eddying heritage
accompanied by nothing
but my own growing strength.


To the victors
go the despoiled.


The world is my dog run.
I shall not want
for exercise.

My bones now hollow and papery as words,
blown as hornets nests.

Earth will return them to me.


Salute

Rescued again, despite my best efforts, by my very uselessness.
The divinities can’t even see me,
those jerk-offs in their boudoir universes,
for whom only you're either a backscratcher or a tambourine.

Free as a parking lot at 3 AM. Here’s my best trick. Look!.
I disappear in the weeds along with the extinct
high desert mining towns whose only surviving acolyte I am;
and the infinitely brittle, star lit thing still living in them,
a creature of whispers and paper-mâché,
half imaginary, too stupid to die; to which I pledge allegiance.


Beware of Poem

What a beating
that poem gave me.

Fed me
in little pieces,
to my wishes.

Night, you look
a lot smaller
on television.

Still, I flourished,
suddenly,
until I didn`t.

Beware of nourishment.
The skinny one
is my co-pilot;
La Flaca, pale hand
where the stars succumb.


I was to be the lungs
in some floundering anatomy.
I thought, "Why not?"

I am, I think,
because of the rustle that hunts me.

Look at us, skeletons
with burning crowns,
kicking up dust
as if we were real.

Go ahead, Poem,
smoke me.
I`m home now.
You know the address.


Blues with a Skeleton Key in its Palm

My eyesight wanders off,
starry revolver, a dog
drawn to your softness.

I stay here waiting
for it to come home,
listening
to the continents drift.

I will miss
your snaggle
toothed sick
room piquancy
the most.

Somedays
you were a roadside grave;
others, you were smoke rising
from behind a hill.

Bête noire
Slaughterhouse,
feeling you still
silverfish
spirochete
limping thing
little fistula
rag doll
on the ash heap--
your history
like grief in me.

No end in sight to this
bag of tricks.
I can just discern
somebody`s death mask
down there circling
mouthing words
I can`t make out.

Widows mite,
It gets passed around,
from hand to hand
growing heavier,
every time,
until we sink.



Richard Cronshey is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Snow and The Snow, forthcoming from ONLS press. His poems have appeared previously in Zone.