OUR CRYPT
Nothing will sleep in our basement,
It’s damp as a ditch,
Small flowers break out of boxes stalking
cracks in the concrete.
Buds swayed and slouched,
Dangling from moldy crates,
Drooped down long yellow vile stalks, like serpents.
And what a muster of stinks!
Roots with wet shafts,
muck, green, swollen against slimy planks.
Striving for life:
While the muck keeps gasping.
UNDER THE WEATHER---A FUNERAL
Damp church pews glistened with
grief. Sorrow poured out and rushed freely
from our eyes.
Our pain came
as if from a hidden song in the bible.
We suffered, knelt, pleaded, chanted,
compromised with God while asking
for words of certainty.
We blasphemed, sought assurance, we mourners in black,
full of holy struggle, our hands and faces damp,
from the edges of understanding.
OUR DREAMS ARE BONFIRES
Our dreams are bonfires.
Our words are flames.
When you puncture us, we bleed electromagnetic sparks
When you scrape us, we split and increase
Our mothers molded us from cloud-love
and smiling wisps, but our
songs are upheavals and tempests. Our balm is thunder
like drilling for oil and rattling down through the earth.
When our mothers embraced us, we showered from the sky.
When they left us, we rumbled and turned into
lightning. We are the not sleep our parents gave us.
We are the stories we tell ourselves
And when we close our eyes,
we are the gold-plated fillings inside the mouth
Rattling down to the bowels.
Dick Bentley’s books, Post-Freudian Dreaming, A General Theory of Desire, and All Rise are available on Amazon. He won the Paris Writers/Paris Review’s International Fiction Award and has published over 280 works of fiction, poetry, and memoir in the US, the UK, France, Canada, and Brazil. He served on the Board of the Modern Poetry Association and has taught at the University of Massachusetts. Find him online at www.dickbentley.com.