L.R. Harvey Poetry

the room with broken clocks The room with broken clocks  is small and square, the blue of robin eggs when evening slips  between the window shades, comes trickling through the curtain's teeth. Sitting alone and not alone, a thrift-shop Proust  face-up upon  my lap, my right foot measures out  the fiddle solo in Dust in the Wind   that played this morning on the radio.  There is no tick of time. I float amid the stillness of the now, reminded once again why I refuse to spend a dollar eighty-nine to buy  an off-brand pack of double-A’s at Walmart; a dollar eighty-nine to spin the earth.

dream state You died we got divorced or maybe we just had a fight and then you asked  if I would like to see the school and you are still alive  and we go skipping through  the cobalt cold-lights halls and then I give  you a kiss and then  we both are on a boat  but now you are my brother and  you tell me that  the way to truth is through  the yellow door  which makes a lot of sense and so  I travel back to our house the one with creaky floors in North Carolina and I find  the yellow door inside the backyard oak  and open it and then the ground gives out          and I am falling                             falling              ...

sometimes the world is beautiful July the 4th,  a dandelion bows its head beneath the corner of our quilt, while more  stand proud, erect  as patriots to watch the fire flowers bloom  across the fertile dirt  of midnight. How lovely, living stuck  between the flowers.

white noise The fan beside my bed-side whispers me  to rest, a gurgling flood of air  that lifts my mattress ark—                                            afloat, I slip in sleep.  At 4:13, awake to hear the drowning voices of my dreams  that cling to floating scraps of consciousness,  to hear my wife beside me breathe the rest I do not have, I do not hear  the fan.  Strange, how constant-things  will pack their bags, vacation in  the tropics of unawareness till  we force them back  with heightened strength of will.  The black  of night illuminates my darkest fear,  and grasping at her sleep-twitched hand  I wonder if she fails to hear my own white noise:                        ...