Skip to main content

Gary Glauber

Image
By
Little Cherub

The boy seems to know far too much.
He’s young but seems less than innocent,
an old soul I wouldn’t have trusted
even in some earlier incarnation.

When I see him at the public pool,
doing things no youngster should do,
it makes me crave a strong drink.

Beware both baby and bathwater;
beware everything you can possibly think.

Whiskey hits gullet with fire,
reminding me of all that I love
and desire to protect, now and always,
to never forget.

In church, he looks heavenly
in white robes, little angel
incapable of evil, dreaming only good.
Altar boy altered,
knowing open hearts make easy targets.

His secrets are troubling,
what occurs behind the giggling.
His private hell is burning
beside lessons he’s not learning.

When fire catches into flame
your children will be safe again,
when all I loved before today
catches wind and melts away.

Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He champions the underdog, and strives to survive modern life’s absurdities. He has two collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press) and Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), and a chapbook, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press).  A new chapbook of surreal work, The Covalence of Equanimity, a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize, is now available from SurVision Books. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

By
                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony
1 comment
Read more

Jim Daniels

By
Half Days My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself, fought an unidentified infection in her spine as it softened her discs into disappearance. I’d unread that story if she were young and still listened to lullabies. After she got discharged, I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot antibiotics into her port while she slept, her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return to school: half days—follow my dotted line smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs— at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring at her friends as they strolled across the street to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said, embarrassed by illness like hard acne or a blooming hickey, wrong music or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school jumper she no longer had to wear. I was there to drive her to
Post a Comment
Read more

Paul Blackburn and Sexism

By
How does one respond to sexism in poets whose work seems to be filled with it, like Blackburn? The quick answer most people would give is: ignore it. Yet here I am, reading more and more, and yes, enjoying, the supposedly sexist work of Paul Blackburn and wondering why there isn't much if any criticism of his important work in the late 50s and 60s, when he served as gatekeeper and recorder of many readings which have helped establish the avant-garde presence and reading scene in New York as well as given us great historical insight into the poets associated at that time with the New York scene.  And of course I'm thinking about his poems, which kept him in the middle of things as a talent in his own right. It's not difficult, unfortunately to see why he's not read, and that makes me sad. His poetry is worth more than a few cursory footnotes to the era. I've come to the conclusion now, after dipping into the collected poems at length, but randomly, and reading fo
3 comments
Read more