Friday, October 19, 2018

Ian Gannasi Loses His Sneaker's In A Yearbook Dream, Ponders Egrets AND Regrets, And Buying The Middle Of Nowhere A Coke


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.