Kevin P. Roddy: featured

KING'S GAMBIT DECLINED

They're arguing over offices, but
I have left, wishing else to burn my eyes,
Searching the garbage-heap of other ages'
Cherishings. I have stuffed my sack with torn
orgasms, lifted from the young, and sucked
My rent wife limp, sobbing for compassion.
Which offices are larger, which pen
To the north, which are new, and which have been
Recently painted. And yet the gray plains
Reproach me, saying that the arid is
Not my preferring, what has drained the mist
Out of me is heart; it's an anvil, dark
Hard-set against my chest, cold flakes floating,
Where night pounds my constricted arteries
In its forge.

THE SCULLY DAYS AT PEPSI

The Scully Days at Pepsi set aside
A structure called the Morgue, where
Set-aside executives had open leave
To find -- in six months -- new venues
For their skills. Honor demanded
Just such compensation: a phone
And thus the lie of facelessness
Probing for purposes more and more
Obvious from the start; and of course,
Staff reworking resumes and watching
The clock. Six times a day the coffee
Ran its course, and out the dead
Would come, from each receptacle,
To -- parallel to each other at the urinal --
Murmur on the vagaries of fate.
Or else, more often, look away,
Afraid of seeing what they knew
They had, suddenly aware
In their eyes' shattering, what it was
They would soon be too.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE

The ultimate hold-out in Indiana
Funneled its hogs in its off-wind end, pushed
Its packaging for distant digestions
Out its other, and faced
It management's windows toward the pigs, an
Indiana wry.
The process that they all acceded to
Meant strings of swine-sacrifice bolt-splintered
In the forehead in a box -- a simple
Clubbing saving blood; but cold hygiene not
Withstanding, their hot vapors rose to plague
The junior office, so that in each deadfall
There was that much more impetus to leap
Higher, further from the business end of things.
They had no notion that the apex was
A narrow bloodless hook, from which to hang
Exhaling some new body, some else's
Pungent spirits.

CHOKER SETTING

There'd be no knowing what it was that came:
The choker glints, a hook caught through one
Link or the other, slippery, rusty,
The chain left lying cross-eyed uneven
On the bearmat, the winch, the diesel's shrug,
About to move a Doug Fir still breathing,
Raging through its length, resisting the smoke;
The squeal, chirp, ring in bantering whispers
Of parting, all I'd hear, her close giggle,
Splitting me, caresses, at my chin, throat,
My chest, my own insides, slipping out there
On the damp and graying sawdust.

PLUMMET

At the conference no one'd hired me
The old man I propositioned had refused
In stark confusion, I went up to our room
And tumbled out the window --
The old men wait in rooms
And we like shit along the sewers
Rub ourselves headlong down the halls
Pouring out into an earth that mindless
Accepts us. I found no meaning
In my own descent.

SPIRIT LEVEL

Depending on the way you grasp at it,
All things can be told they're even: turbid
In ebbs of random energy, the oil
Chooses to encapsulate horizons.
Parameters that match six symmetries,
Each that can be, it; bearing, fraught, revising
(by the heartsend), it leads it through drawn tossed
Channels, to an oval green and golden
Reconciliation.

RUDDERLESS BOAT

They have transported us, my son and me,
Us two, in this coffin, as is fitting --
For once I understood how little was
The love they'd afforded him. I knew
It would be better if we stayed, as now,
Together, and, then, someday, to have him
Become what it was they were, i took
Him with me.