Christopher J. Grasso

...

We round asphalt by straight lines,
make lanes for four turns of left continuous.
I pace on this cage of road,
bolted into the shell of sweating machine,
...

(An intertexual marriage poem of an excerpt from a teacher’s letter to parents, a letter from a mother to the child she gave away for adoption and a letter that I should not have seen)


Dear Parents or Guardians,
...

Immense men battle
Gladiators of our time
Form a human wall
...

Crash of hearts and percussion,
Love as painful as a quarterback concussion,
Rising crescendo of sweltering thoughts rushes,
Anticipation of compliments are reddening blushes.
...

The world is goina’ hurt me,
Worse than any form of dropping dead can.
The world is goina’ hurt me,
Worse than any form of dropping dead can.
...

Suncatcher glowing in tinges of rainbow onto the table, next to the Bible,
glare from the window slithers along the hallway floor, in a minuet fraction all day,
fingers rub the tablecloth, the tea breathing heavy, steams,
eyes wonder distant, blended into spring and horizon.
...

Chant of midnight, death’s huff
I expose your coward weakness like erosion
In darkness dwell, I my hatred for you - full of sin you filthy vile
I will worship your dying
...

A Painter’s Rendition Of Counterfeiting (or Stealing The Senses)

I paint with cranberries and sundowns,
canvas nibbling form and shape,
...

Spurs reverb along the empty desert plain and stop right above view
Vultures circling are the only witnesses of a noon showdown which is quite overdue
The winds a whispering partner, the tumbleweed moves past
And eyes stung with sweat and sun peer through the souls of men
...

Your “Fevered Poem” splits my throat
Crunching into stripped out vocal chords
As punishment of uttering these chants to sound
...

Whipped by this situation
brunt like a cigarette ash flicked from a bridge
deadened and confused
& pain within the chest compressed
...

I am the hurtling of fangs to flesh – the poison within
A substitution of righteousness, an aura of opposition – a terror within

The subversive smile clenching under tongue and teeth – hiding all lies with a grin
...

Some time when the river is ice ask me

When did we start to drift?
...

Delicious changing seasons, the screen clinging catastrophe, awaiting the dragonfly
A star mounted anomaly in the shape of an asterisk is the dragonfly

A string bean caught by the fluff of the garden’s breeze
...

Enlightened
dissident
requesting
God’s
...

Perceptions awaken the ambush of Dawn’s curling morning,
Whose blushes bend the temptations of consciousness,
Across the pale gray region known to men as light.
Her wrist brushes midnight into a burrow unrefuted,
...

We are the clutter of a bookstore
Cluttering the space of stacking in order
Stacking ourselves above the rungs of levelness
Leveling ourselves as clutter stacks too high
...

Never a day not of Good-byes and exits
leavings pressed together waits to depart
faces and bodies uniform, moving away
...

Your machines shrill like hawks, they are wrong in the forest,
Your hands stop the jingle of a pocketful of coins as,
You sell the tree of knowledge with a buyback option,
You make an escapade from the dirt where you were born from.
...