Philip Hammial Poems

Home alone, late at night, doing what I always do. I’m rowing. Sitting on my kitchen chair, chained to an oar, I’m one of a hundred slaves making sure that the galley keeps moving forward through a sea that is sometimes calm,
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And went to one of the Glory Temples for which
our city is famous & found
a sick congregation – spitting blood
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If we assume that every third house is logical
it follows that there’s literature in abundance
on the subject of steamer trunks of the kind
that one might find in every fourth house. She
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Tony has opened a museum of madness. He’s persuaded the administrators to lease one of the rooms in the basement of the Museum of Natural History – a huge, high-ceilinged room in which the displays – in glass cases &
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Had me a word up. One. Through water
it went by some way
I could not follow. In
the depth of me was there
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Should have sent that birthday card to my sister. Did
I remember to double-lock the front door? That word –
culpable – that I used in that poem; too jarring,
& the thesaurus gone astray. opto & then
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Common graves pan out
in a felicitous escapade – a waltz
of merry widows, their gigolos done up
as clockwork thugs. Six bells
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If yours can be substituted for several
you’re in business, says my guardian (at my side
like a shadow). But which business? Odds are
that it’s dubious. A straw concession, say – selling
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As you would suspect the plow
of infidelity if the ox
had a human face so you would
the dead if they rehearsed their marriages
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Without arms or legs, they wiggle out of the sea & up onto the beach shouting commands from fish-like mouths, the authorities. "Put your best & bluest eyes in the crinkled scars where our limbs were attached! Hurry up!
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