Two Poems

John Bradley

Please Refrain from Fondling My Personal Values

Dear Magritte,
                  Justice being one of the seven deadly virtues.

“Pain is good,” sings Rene, “when it’s good pain.”  My father rubs that red spot at the base of his spine where Georgette, with her sewing shears, snipped off his most sumptuous stumpy tail  “Could someone explain how to avoid the pubic in public?” the bowler-hatted man asks his private bowler.  “I need all the objects to be carved out of balsa,” explains Rene for the forty-fourth time to his assistant, “so I can make them appear to have weight in the painting.”  Nothing suggests infinity so much as confinement; nothing suggests confinement so much as infinity,” says the blameless bowler.  But who said: “Slide the Persian rug off angle a bit so it looks like someone lives here”?  “Joseph Cornell stopped by and said to tell you to please return his shadowbox,” Georgette tells the clouds inside Rene’s head.  She doesn’t say to Rene, “The shaving soap looks like a.) a broached breast, b.) a preemptory pillow, c.) the mouth of a muffin, d.) something plumbed from the plumber.”  “How much will this count for the final grade?” asks Jack.  A calico comb is not a calico comb when it’s bigger than a bed.  Georgette in the mirror watching Jack collect her cotton so Rene would have fluff for his coughless clouds.  The public in pubic unable to blink.  Jack keeps chewing, chewing on the back leg of the bed in the painting and Rene keeps painting, painting it pure.  That crackling in the ceiling nothing to do with the groan at the end of the world.

Use of this brush allowed only
in national emergency
involving no bodily fluids.

***

I Missed the: Train, Smoke, Clock

Dear Magritte,
An acre of land on the moon--for you--for only $19.99 (plus $1.51 lunar sales tax).

“Who put that beastly train in our fireplace?” Georgette yells to the cracks in the ceiling.  Are you Jack or candlestick that consume its own flame?  I prefer carpenter to carpenter ant, crow to crowded fly, ear to airless rail.  “The locomotive smoke must make you want to consummate,” Rene tells Jack, “not constipate.”  I prefer a handkerchief that pities no hand, kerchief that hastens to no chief.  “But can the beat in the blood feel the pump of its passage?” wonders Jack.  I prefer hammer to plate, platelet to spoon, a moon that gnaws its own whom.  “I hear the untracked train station rushing upon us,” warns the bowlered man who appears where Magritte recedes.  The minute the mirror watches Jack, Jack washes the mirror, but the mirror never wishes Jack watched Jack, not even the minute Jack mirrors the mirror.  I prefer fur to depilation, though both consume many pages in the Book of Household Erotica.  “But how fast can a fast-moving train choo-choo when it’s choo-chooing out of a fireplace that’s not moving at all?” the train’s brain ponders.  “Dali already did this chimney-train thing,” Jack confides to Georgette, who tattles to Rene, who takes off his belt, who proposes to Jack: “Stick out your tongue, son.”            

“So that each of my clocks
when they chime, chime
at slightly different times.”

John Bradley is the author of Terrestrial Music (Curbstone), War on Words (BlazeVOX), and most recently, You Don't Know What You Don't Know (CSU Poetry Center). His work has appeared in ACM, APR, Big Bridge, Blue Mesa, Caliban, Ironwood, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Lake Effect, Pemmican, and other journals.  He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.  He teaches at Northern Illinois University.

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