L.R. Harvey Poetry

Wake, Sleepers Regarding the leveled charge of being  half-awake, I take what appears the stand and mutter a soft guilty that slips through my hands like something not unlike blood  or butter. To the ensuing one  of being okay with it I smear them  with a scream of innocent, innocent,  innocent till it swells the open  orifice of their ears and their faces  melt as I sit up in bed, drenched  at last in real, salty sweat.

Beneath the Sink Not much room to wiggle  your elbows or get anything  like torque behind the wrench, and did I mention how the rusted nut  of the world is tucked so far back you just have to feel  for it, eyes crawling on the cobwebs you let spread under  the cabinet while your fingers fumble for a catch, that tightening you’ve come to connect  as potential , the grip that keeps you  coming back to spend the long afternoon  of your life chasing the chance that like a breath, like water  from the rock, suddenly it loosens.

The Cardinal Moment  After the rain a thick blanket  of crow settled on the field and feasted on the soft bodies washed up and wriggling, and heaven, refusing  not to see, wept blood, and a drop  dripped from the poplar tree  and settled no where else but right on the brow of this black  fever, and in a breaking   thunderous enough to shake the broken back into place all the darkness took flight. 

In the town that lost its daughters to a single blast, the boys grow up  with no one to kiss them out of their iron ideas and back  into the velvet touch of the living room couch. Naturally they will  kill each other i n a later act. No one plays with the dolls  and stuffy's and lovey's so the dolls  and stuffy's and lovey's are not played with,  and, seeing this to be so, bank the latent glow behind their painted lids and recede back into plastic, and the trees, seeing this, know  that the animus has left the place  and stop whispering their pine-scented secret to Saturday afternoons and the crow  and the occasional pair of pigtails that used to listen in and giggle at their pluck, now embarking  on their return to inanimate exchange of sunlight, water, and a sugar y ou've read about but can't taste. The roads are repaved remarkably straight,  what with everyone knowing where they’re going  and no one not knowing enough a...

Wardrobe I am a study in false-starts. I have tried and tried more to keep in separate drawers my project pants from more projectable   slacks, but the dividers crumble till it all slides back in the jumble like each fresh attempt to save receipts. I get out my books and teach with paint on my ass, take the bread and wine with caulk smeared down my left leg. When I reach  into my pocket for a pen I find a Philips head and the clink of a few, loose words. Screw it again. I am a walking project.  

The Tinkerer Repents No one, likely, will ever see the fresh coat of white  on the back of the doghouse,   the unpainted part kept hid and slid flush to the house and invisible unless you drop something important back there and slide it out, which no one, likely, will ever do. So I considered,  considering, not wasting the work of another hour on my knees for what’s behind and unseen, but man there's something to it, how deep I sleep when I know   that—whenever it's time to re- arrange the garage—I can.