Stranger

by Victor Coleman

150 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

1.

a love that is cream
 pie in the face against
an edge that cuts everything

funny in the face of despair
 a new juxtaposition
in every dropping name

their fat revolutionary asses
 kissed by a new breed of
sycophantic mono-syllabic

idiots aping the thrust
 of some drug as it forms in them
the smoking barrel of their particulars


2.

the baby uneasily teeters
 at the edge & shoves
her fist amidst the rocks

brought here 3000 miles
 There will be a time
I won't remember

as writing this
 I speak to no one


3.

I wish I had my gun I wish I did
 there isn't 'into' anything
we haven't 'farther' either

I have memory
 I plastic bag over my head
which leads me into a canyon of prerequisites

a perspective ? of ideas
 to know that I might be
that living lie I so belaboured

ageless
 so long ago
I'd scarce care to recall


4.

the man who ran comically
 smoothly through
the gears of some machine

only to life the red flag
 of innocence up to betrayal
& fell in with awe

Tight assed?
 Imagine
There is no assailable opening

in a people who're reflective
 & rapidly diminishing


5. 

I seldom look at any object
 or my love too closely
The wastepaper basket that holds

my dreams is empty
 & the sodden skin grows slack
as a broad shouldered me

leaks out like the blood
 of some Nigerian mercenary
easing over the white man's road

It is a broken voice
 that announces our position
& if you are truly

up front
 where deaths are inevitable
the whistling has your name on it
- Crumpled Paper

* * *

this is
watch
you want

intent
to know those
clevernesses

that keep in-
tense alive
mouths initial

Moved against
by my own abandon
I rage to love

or know
what such means
might bring such as I

find myself being
beginning
to hide

tracing the lines
of your mouth
in an act

that would be
description of bodies
as counting out dead

This tender latch
of the sexual 
stick shift

the body is 
ultimate in
the machine

after all that 
back to the start
choking on heart

Unlike many relational insurances
there is a link
not sexual

where fear comes up
tender exzema to the surface
one thinks of as attachment

there seems to be
so little to give
& almost no one who will take it
- The Voyeur, for Judith Cowan

* * *

man's
possessive

mind's
in hand

hell
he'll take you

every chance he gets
he gets stuck

up your black
& silent crack

we love it
all of us

& pain rides
home in a taxi

Kali: vengeance
destroyer of time

I begot no earth
forget my face

in tears the aeons
'red labia'
- In Vain

* * *

I've got this notion
of my big toe beside
your big toe in the ocean

or maybe this lake
what we after all 'have'
implicit in our silence

bu I see firm tits
& a bit too much low feeling
about the bumbling behind us

or I read up in my man
hood to bear some flaming
cross for your lost innocence

craving the touch of your
young limbs against what
clamours to my senses

like the 'new' music
unmodulated
unlike the ocean of this lake

until I finally found you
in my arms you
were there all the time
- Looking for Gretchen

* * *

I was just discussing with Marcel Dot
the washed out bridge between Art & Life

the steady flow of money
lifting our voices in praise of the state

we know the ferns won't vote
placing open books before the tree

while campers and trailers and Fat City wives
respond to the lure of the sea

on the solid side of the line
buoyed up in air by our bodies

in bathingsuits and blurred reputations 
sinking Mnemosyny snidely rebukes us
- Economy | Anonomy