Alan Britt

Girl in Yellow

This morning your breasts were frozen

tulips & your eyes, well, clearly you

wear contacts, watery jade contacts,

for what purpose, I can't say,

but you must've overheard.

Light through library curtain

frames you like Fragonard's La Liseuse,

pensive, palpitating beneath your

21^st Century canary gown's

dirty secrets hidden between

white satin folds.

Clearly you were that girl in yellow

reading the verses of obscure poets

as though they were sacred hymns.

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Good Friday 

For you corporate brats...shining armor beneath florescent garage beams that supported your mother's mother.....♀.....plus all the Mothers recorded in the Library of Congress or registry for Wayne County, about as far as an archive telescope can backtrack before caving into itself thereby leaving the previous dimension. 'Bout as far back as the primordial brain will allow.....♥.....for you tumbled from the womb like dice & laughed at bruises below the desperate eye shadow of a cataract moon, as if accuracy were a crime...♦...as if...as if...☻...as though a backwards three is the answer you brats scrawl across New Jersey overpasses when you're not inserting your hypodermic sensibility into a clear plastic bag hanging from a brushed aluminum hook in the antiseptic ICU on Good Friday.

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Goin' Green

In the northeast corner of the pipe there's a straggler, trapped between screen & black hole, a regular Jack the Ripper, topcoat folded over his sickness so society might accept him, even though everyone agrees he's unacceptable. Silly details rob us of months, weeks, days, hours & milliseconds when we should enjoy the waking dream of a Florida mockingbird rivaling an English nightingale every night of the week, once imagination removes its work boots, woolen socks & soaks its bare feet before a roaring fire. The straggler's days are numbered & so are the days of his friends.

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MURDER INCORPORATED

(Bobby's got a gun that he keeps below his pillow

Out on the streets your chances are zero)

                                --Bruce Springsteen

You might think you're fooling,

but you're not.

Given opportunities

to travel this way or that,

you chose a pathological path.

Stop pumping premium

into your offshore account; stop

for an honest misclick at the pump,

pain almost bearable; stop for the liar

at the local liquors

begging change for a pack of Camels.

Well, if you stop, I will too.

Hell, if you stop, the future

might become the heaven

promised us that morning

Uncle Amoeba found himself beached

for the last time in his primordial life

& said I'll put a 30-story building

over there, & soon as I get the chance

I want to own all the books,

all the museums, all the coffee houses,

all the darkened theaters with sticky black floors

& rocking seats with 32 oz. cup holders,

all the fruits & veggies in our suburban crispers,

all the people we've loved who could've loved us,

&, finally, all the words ever spoken

or get spoken in one trendy underground venue or another

with wobbly tables & Salvation Army couches

near the corner of first & filthy Main.

Anyway, I'm betting you can't count that high,

but in case you can, I've got

a surprise for you & surprises

are not commodities...shucks to that


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If Jesus Had a Dime Every Time
He Was Asked "Why Myrrh?"

So, what's this about one of the wisemen

bringing myrrh for the birth of God's only son,

so far as He knows, but what the hell

can you do with myrrh?

Well, in those days myrrh deodorized places:

bed chambers, privies, kitchens & barns,

wherever it smelled, & places smelled a lot back then.

For bonus it packed medicinal value for cuts,

insect bites, gum disease & indigestion;

hence, the price of myrrh was through the roof!

Sort of like a high priced plug-in today,

imitation myrrh found at local Target?

For the most part.

That's gotta be getting off easy,

don't you think, & one more thing,

I have to break our date for next Thursday;

something's come up.

Well, then.


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