ACCIDENTAL DISASTER
Indispensable figments of my imagination.
Becky beckons.
Whichever direction I go it’s the wrong way.
She was a nurse
With a sexy voice
And nothing to say.
What does it mean to have lost one’s sneakers
in a dream?
Old high school yearbooks don’t amount to
much.
What kind of a guy
Are you and I?
Despite all his faults he really was an idiot.
A vice when successful is called virtue.
In my father’s high school yearbook:
“From a drip to a dope.”
Pictures of an exhibitionist.
A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow
with a sword.
I got cars you got cars all god’s children got
cars.
Well-wrapped in his defense mechanisms,
He got trapped in the bathroom.
THE USUAL MISCALCULATIONS
Like trying to plug the holes in a sieve,
It could have been worse, but not by much.
A bowling buddy?
A driver of last
resort?
“Home, Hives!”
“Unsend, Unsend,” “Abort, Abort.”
We have wasted our lives.
Sam the Sham and
the Pharaohs
Were an indelible
part of the show.
They were completely right, and wrong in part.
I guess you’re as much you as you can be.
So am I, but we’re playing in different keys.
“I don’t know what I’m going to play,” he
repeated.
Egrets from the train window.
(Not to mention regrets.)
It is
posed and it is posed,
What in
nature merely grows.
“Ah, good taste! What a
dreadful thing!”
Blue moon, blue cheese,
And whatever else she wanted to sing.
Funny how I didn’t see that coming. I did see it going
however.
The executioner took his time as he fondled
the lever.
Taking a long time to
come to bad decisions:
At the hanging the
criminal’s head popped off
Due to someone’s miscalculation.
OFFERINGS
Accused of a crime I was considered to have
considered,
I preferred to stay in bed.
“You’ve beaten and you’ve been beaten”
Was the theme of The Lost Weekend.
Me no like.
The thought
or speech balloon
Gets halfway
there and then deflates.
The anonymity
of glamour, the glamour of anonymity,
Dark glasses
in the middle of the night.
I’ve about
had it.
It depends at
what depth one focuses the lens,
At what power
of magnification.
Shocking
where he got off,
On the
platform in what seemed
The middle of
nowhere.
I’d like to buy the world a Coke.
All the
various offerings are worth a hill of beans.
The best defense against germs is to ignore
them.
She had a vivid orange in her
tortoise shell pattern.
My paraphrase can’t compete with the original.
Prestidigitation,
misdirection,
Valentine
cards and mourning doves ...
But no
satisfying explanation of the snake
That
crawled out of Anchises’s tomb.
Ian Ganassi’s poetry, prose and translations have appeared
in more than 100 literary journals. Poems have appeared recently or are
forthcoming in New American Writing, The Yale Review, 2Bridges Review, American
Journal of Poetry and Clockwise Cat, among many others. His poetry collection
Mean Numbers was published in 2016, and is available on Amazon. His new
collection of poetry, True for the Moment, will be published in the fall of
2019 by MadHat Press. Selections from an ongoing collage collaboration with a
painter can be found at www.thecorpses.com.