| Three Poems by David Lawrence
Tanked The optimum plunk of your being here is held back by your reserve. I can't see the fire in your eyes. The shades of obfuscation are lies. I know you still burn for me like a Lucky Strike. It's a slow fire, lethal. I fill my lungs up with you like I'm in a fish tank. I am swimming around the glass choking. You could be so breathable if you just let your gills down. The Wild West There's something about a cowboy that stinks. Is it history? I never smelled the past. It smelled me. Caught up in the nostrils of range rustlers I want to kill Indians and wrestle steer. It is the suicidal part of me that's not Arizona. They don't kill themselves in open plains. Death walks around the floorboards like mice in abandoned apartments in New York. I jump up on the podium like a lecturer on Hart Crane, push aside the bank robber, throw myself on the deck, hang myself from a rope. D.H. Lawrence You take the lion's head off your shoulders and have no head. There are lions in my background that ate salamanders. I never said my family had taste. They liked to change colors. On the African plains I looked for my last name. It used to be Lowenkron, Lion's Crown. I changed it to Lawrence because I wanted to be the author of Sons and Lovers. Except that he was a skinny tubercular man and I am a scrappy Jew, king of the jungle, who knocked out a big black man in a four round fight at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. David Lawrence |