I MUST HAVE A FEAR OF SPHERES AND WHEELS (Critique Welcome)

by chrispoet

Posted to Poetry on 2003-08-16 15:04:00

I MUST HAVE A FEAR OF SPHERES AND WHEELS
—-for Marlene Boyce


I always hated basketball,
The squeak of sneakers
On a glossy court,
The snotty wit of suburbanites in love
With cars.

I didn’t get my driver’s license
Until I was hit by a car
Riding a bicycle, on the sidewalk,
At twenty-six years old.

Whenever eating Lemonheads,
Johnny Apple Treats,
Jawbreakers,
Atomic Fireballs,
Or Everlasting Gobstoppers,
I fear that I will suck them
Into my windpipe.
I fear my eyeballs
Will fail me further,
And darken this dark world more.

I’m suspicious of the wheel of fifths,
Or any other system
As neat as that. Surely there’s order
In chaos, But I’ll leave that
To Joyce, and the mathematicians.

I’ve known the inexorable sadness of cylinders,
Time unraveling through the rewinder,
The tapes that snapped,
Pulleys that failed the tapes,
The gears universal
To all machines with parts that move.

I’ve driven at night, circling the ramps
As if scavenging for carrion,
Following a straight line
Down a doomed horizon,
And reckoned the freeway
As a high-speed deadly treadmill.


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