Jeffrey Park- Three Poems

HYDROPHILIA

You talk about dry.

Can you even begin to imagine
what it’s like
to come from a really dry place,
seriously dry,
parched land, parched air, parched sky,
parched people
who can only dream (dream!) of
having cracked lips
and thick swollen tongues,

who would look upon your Gobi
and Mojave and Kalahari
as some kind of exotic waterpark,
who would gladly die
a thousand painful deaths
just to behold
a single blade of grass coated with
the faintest sheen of dew?

No. You cannot begin to imagine.

Nor, if you could, would you waste
a thought
for your desiccated fellow creatures,
you who have never once
known dry.
But we are here now,
watching you and smelling you
and wondering about
your precise chemical composition:
60% water, or so it’s said.

Let’s find out.


SLEEPERS

Velvet horizon
pre-dawning
to sparking comets,
celestial winks
to assorted philosophers,
stargazers
and omen readers,
flashes in an overturned
skillet,
etching retinas,
and disappearing in
a wisp of ash.

Except for a few
cunning imposters,
who come
gliding down into
the complicit
folds
of an undiscovered
world.

You suspect –
only you –
and watch for them
on the street,
in the bus, tram,
post office,
among your neighbors,
in your bed.
They’re easy enough
to spot.
They’re the ones
who look
like they’ve always
been here.


YOU ARE NOT WELCOME

Greasy space invaders,
bug-eyed splay-toed gooblies,
posers from some backwards gassy-giant’s
fourteenth moon
or twisted tunnel across dimensions –

they creep, creep into our neighborhoods
and back out again when they think
we’re not looking,
steal out thoughts, dreams, longings,
songs, plots from our most creative

and groundbreaking TV series,
touch our privates,
taste our sweat, and then have the nerve
to tell themselves they’ve done
the natives no harm at all.

And we should be – what?
Grateful?
Tickled by their filthy alien attentions?
The bastards.

They might at least have the decency
to mindwipe a guy’s nosy, holier-than-thou,
stuck-up, snooty a-hole of a neighbor
or eat a few goddamn stray cats
as long as they’re here.

 

 

 

Bio: Jeffrey Park's poetry has appeared most recently in Century 121, Snow Monkey, One Sentence Poems, and the anthology Tic Toc from Kind of a Hurricane Press. A native of Baltimore, Jeffrey currently lives in Munich, Germany, where he works at a private secondary school. Links to all of his published work can be found at www.scribbles-and-dribbles.com