Christopher M. Lavery

Contents:

a hundred years ago today a man was sitting in a room

When Life Started

Across the street from another country: Part One

superman

Sneeze

ode to clouds and big skies: part one

ode to clouds and big skies: part two

of pirates and pioneers

Conspiracy

Ode to Suburban Nights

Across the street from another country: Part Two

Trees

hunting

Bibliography

a hundred years ago today a man was sitting in a room

there was this day that he left the   place   he thought was the place he was supposed
to be and realized that this place was a construction of memory

his memory has failed even when he died

I feel the _________ has broken me in two

the nonsense the romantic notions
the memory connected to a time of being a child

lost,                                fleeting and funny

the gigantic monster awakens, takes care of business, and either dies or goes back to
sleep 

……something in      the beast has gone terribly awry,

an injustice of biblical proportions keeps me awake at night wondering when he will
wake up and save us from ourselves and I think about how the world seems songlike,
completely melodic with harmony.    

When Life Started

he set it up there to draw a life from death. 

                    hediesdeadentered       
                          goneforthunknown     
                          traveled     passing
                          hallowed    ground
                          holesholednecrosis
                          _______________.

                          quietus.  quiet.  soft.

odd predatory birds of scavenging lands, migrating, diffusing thoughts of phenomenal
space, thin, carrying the patterns of stars and turning constellations into meaning. 

and men find these birds to destroy, an excuse to avoid the matters of life. 

and women find these birds and excuse the destruction of the matters of life.

Across the street from another country: Part One

window set open during daylight shadow
the phone rang

at the gas station
across the street at the hotel
across from the gas station
across the street
at the house that set next to the hotel
across the street
from the gas station
at the firing range next to the gas station

across the street.  the phone rang.   

I stayed in the hotel on the second floor
the window opened up and let the air    in     the morning
I could see the gas station.

I would wake to guns being fired at the shooting range

across the street. 

and I would wake up and look out the window to the clock installed on the grass in
front of the gas station

the clock was set to European time, translate plus eight hours
                                    twenty-four 

from here.  whenever I woke I would look at the clock
try to figure out what time it was at home.

superman

two days ago he sent me a photograph of himself
            facsimiled version of his real self    

   version two.
in the background he jested   jest     gestured gestated.
    probability

a second hand copy

this evolved into loosing his pinkie toe.  he has never lost a tooth. 

he found a shark’s tooth at a thrift store in Connecticut
when I was

22 years ago
another version of the facsimile
we lost that game and lost     our way we found    we had traveled
at least sixteen hours and thirty-four minutes away.

to this day I still can’t look at a clock until it disappears from my conscious. . . 

. . . but I do dream, probing incantation.

Sneeze

her eyes were fixated on pink,           I translucent

myself into belief.   

inventions of situational comedies play on the film television that steals radio signals
from cars made in 1974.                                                         

                                                                                                           cans. 
I can hear her singing through string that runs                                 between 
                                    like muted jazz music behind walls              subdued
                                                                                                           over

outright yard pelted swing set  swing   swings    swung     sang
high pierced ear wrenching noise germinates
from the chain that connects the seat to
the frame and I can’t stop thinking that I was left here.

my eyes fixated on pink,
she became translucent and abstract.
mysterious belief into affordable dwelling subdivisions
flanked by malls and auto repair garages.

dwelling. 

ode to clouds and big skies: part one

I left just before the world ended    
            sometime around 6:39 pm. 
some boots and water and a few other objects
            carried in a large moving truck
towing a blue 1989 cutlass sierra four door K style car. 

The transmission leaked
cat hair flying into my mouth
and I woke up just before the world ended around 6:39 pm.

I think that the ball dropped around midnight
and Dan Rather confirmed the world had ended. 
somebody told me it was new year’s eve  never  even

no explosions.

ode to clouds and big skies: part two

In 1999, the sky got bigger
and the clouds became puffier
my car broke down
mold grew under my bed
got engaged
my grandmother died
I visited Cape Cod
gave away my truck
stayed inside three months in a row
bought a pair of boots
took photographs of Jenn
walked up and down stairs
brewed coffee
became a salesman
ran over a rabbit
got a cell  phone and turned it off
ate my first really hot pepper
blew out the circuits
saw a strange man
drove across Nebraska
quit my job
had cereal for breakfast and ate sushi
shot a gun
went to Jimi Hendrix’s grave
laughed at Clinton
feared at Clinton
got some sun
walked to the store
bought an old car
watched lightening from the mountains
went to the Laundromat
skied on ice
saw wonderful things
and I slept in to 9:26 pm.  

of pirates and pioneers

toy ship in a box of water. 
this is the tale of high sea adventure
and delusional pirate-ism.

on Halloween, pirates

and tattoos inked out on skin. 

accommodations are made through silence.

her underwater schemes developed a new turn
she discovered an unsparing bird
covered in black opals    opulent  ardent   fiery.

In 1974 he conceived a beginning     ruminated an end.

Conspiracy

this morning he woke to find someone had placed 10,000 garden gnomes at the foot
of his bed     
and he woke up and climbed up the side of a building 
             

and he woke up and saw the sunrise from behind the movie theater screen where he
wrote on the wall about his mother:

                                    her name remains somewhere in the hidden forms
                                    behind the screens in movie theaters across America. 

Americans know her
find her
hide her             
summon her                  

                            speak 

to her in the child tone of voice,                             making a sound that compromises
the bargain section in a store outside of my childhood home,
where my sister would buy candy
with the money my grandmother gave us                              last Sunday after church
and she would give us this old chewing gum that was in her purse and it smelled like
lipstick and tasted like toothpaste.  I usually spat it out after two seconds of chewing
because I hated to brush my teeth when I was five. 

Ode to Suburban Nights

and if my dog barks at the moon at night,
where the broken sprinkler geyser showers,
and if sidewalk bathers stammer over

saran wrap, wrapped over saffron rice,
sometimes mixed with jasmine,
and if my dog barks at the moon at night

where he watered the lawn,
in the down pouring rain late at night,
and if sidewalk bathers stammer over

there is a war outside on the television
and televised correspondences do no good,
and if my dog barks at the moon at night.

I am making flirtatious attempts at living, leaving,
and my home is much smaller than yesterday,
and if sidewalk bathers stammer over

I think of my father who did not go to war,
and if I have to I’ll shoot off my foot,
and if my dog barks at the moon at night,
and if sidewalk bathers stammer over.

Across the street from another country: Part Two

this time there is an Asian family selling plastic molded, oversized garden gnomes
in the middle of nowhere where we drove
thinking

we were going in the right direction
and felt car sick
the winding road traveling through the neoterical fields fertilized,
stinking of some animal and a person.

Communists once occupied this place and I felt American
although the cold war has been over for several years now

This is my first trip to Europe and not well informed.
language.

old person,
walks into the street making gestures that complaining old people make when they
know you are young and trying to run them over with a blue station wagon made from spare parts                                           left over. 

it seems a long way from home and I have never been to___________________.

Trees.

especially in the winter

one time or another I would write odes to devices, to objects, that I disagreed with.

implementing horrors and seducing hostile migratory birds from nests, testing sites,
and shopping mall parking lots that looked like
a necropolis containing cars, wind blown trash as tumbleweeds
and children in Halloween costumes:

ghosts
witches
frankensteins
mummies

as usual the birds flocked overhead ca-cawing in strange rhythmic patterns,
mimicking human conversation,

still searching for that machine I laid out for them. 

hunting

the song of two keeps streaming in my head.            somebody hears 
those birds  saturating

mind waves that roll over and over     and over     like oranges escaping from the shelf
in the produce section of the supermarket.

she leans and hugs a place that becomes a place     to place herself into and changes the thought patterns of an artificial light streaming from above.

Señor Misterioso
1.    stalks the high     darkened     glows in the corner of my memory. 
2.    he is small but ______________ .  somewhere he takes on life and counter
balances the parking lot that exists in a small town in upstate New York.  Outside of
my apartment it is noisy     at night and I never sleep.     She has been known to linger
around this place like a spirit summoned from the beyond       

                                                                                                            unhappy and cruel

like pop culture definitions/legends he constantly changes his mind about the place he
existed.

yesterday he knew what to write about and today he lost his hold on that sentence that
excited him the day before he knew what to write about  

exited and ceased.  existed.    exited exits.              expiration date    

awakened by the summer sun, she found herself lying in that parking lot, haunted her. 

she once haunted this place.

voluptuous scene
a bathroom in the castle        from behind                     castle walls 

from the pink bathroom stall she could see everything in the landscape.                       
miles out, there is a flock of birds, a murder of crows, swarming a nearby field
looking for the machine that draws their attention.

it makes sounds