Two Poems by John T. Trigonis Pale Imitation of a Rusty Old Night Club Performer I play this ragged piano every night, and every night you waltz away to for your fish bone embrace. I become a paler imitation of Tom Waits, drunk dance on shattered bottles of rusty Bud, each escorted by a crushed-smoke downtown night club ticking and tocking for a bridge that may never come. jazz, open mic amnesia peacocking amidst the barflies and brooders; here, coarse, matchbox heart. Yet this piano is a ransomed Polaroid alibi tossed for my soft, blue winter, switchblade romance; my sacrificial requiem, my my turbulent zoot suit detective, half-eaten Joan of Arc; my wet dream on rekindled peace; this, my one more encore performance invoking your sweet
Things of Consequence, Certainty, and Similarity Milky gray skies of September, bullets that eat their way through There is no waiting sunshine where sand shakes hands with blood, peaceful greetings nearly bestowed from the moist caves out their Chemical rain flushes away the refuse of soldiers, once infants, children, bright eyes have died, welded shut by melted black lies poured into no choice but to defend that freedom. Buried on foreign shores of earth and once men, women, children, friends and enemies, are nothing more than a thing of consequence before. And after? Nothing at all. John T. Trigonis |