Marriage

Your pain envelopes me
in perpetual arms, it’s so much
because it is so forever.

I assume as much as you
can give me I can take, the hollows
absorbing light at evening.

Your pain, shadow, grows in me,
in there.

I hold myself to your body and pray
to accept what disease of the spirit you have,
pray to God to have it transferred by touch
in to me. I accept it. Being here
and wishing this, I accept.

The world brings me its cup.
I drink in all the darkness.

Internal Combustion

Like an engine, I’m exploding inside,
like a forest, I’m exploding with mahogany blasts.
O, you wrenched of the earth. I am like a saw,
my curve slices between trees.

And though I turn only one little wheel
over and over and over and over and over
I can carry you to the far giving,
even as whole ecosystems crumble around me.

And even though I go on, worrying my wheel, I carry you
under the over pass, passed the wavingly serene
and their faces, accomplished faces.

The Mechanics, dip their measuring rods
to see how far the fix is,
how far inside.

I am exploding everywhere, over every surface
which is a road, which is your teeth
upon my gears, weeping gears,

My faces plate pressed to the delicate distance.
The teeth chew me up inside all over again,
boom, churn chew up all over the miles,
the heads popping, gravel gurgle,
my piston’s diminish to a rattle.

This pill will stop your heart

the darkness is turning on a white line
like a vinyl record.

It is numbing like cold.

Keep the moon from your window,
keep your longing in its rocking chair.

If you are lucky you will remember
to put on some music.

In the garbage pile some magnolia branches
with white bulbs like ghosts

that will never flower.

Sea of Glass

Rippled shower curtain,

glass brick
undulants peek
ray guns,

no life but sunlight
could break this,

factual, educated
petroleum squid

rising from the dark
to nibble the acetate light

fixtures, flagellum,
ceiling fans

scatter at the fin,
there’s no cracking this plate

Nylon

I read in your pamphlet
you could make me sheen.

I need to be gorgeous, here eat my children.

I made them, O but I can make more.
I can operate the can opener.

My canopy is vinyl so it lets no air in,
so the sun shakes its fist and blisters,

and the trees go first in a controlled burning,
a freezing black and, yep, no more trees

to muse on, on a manmade sublime,
an orchard of plastic replicas

makes us true gods of our own disaster.  

Jay Snodgrass is the author of The Shambling, zombie poems from Slash Pine Press. His first book is Monster Zero, Poems about Godzilla, from Elixir Press. Book Maker, LetterPress printer, and Asemic Artist, Jay Snodgrass currently teaches at Southwest Georgia Technical College in Thomasville, Georgia.