Three Poems
Daniel Bailey
JAVELIN
The sun cracks its knuckles, shines its shoes, and keeps on walking
At an atomic level, I am sitting on the couch
waiting for the world of others to collide with me
“Yeah, I don’t know,” speaks the holy water
into the holy drain
One’s being reverberates when the collision is true
when only the shatter-proof glass hangs in multitudes
Hold on, let me sing you an aria
from I know I know every hallway and path
and the ceilings thereof
Us (whoever), push through the swinging panes
bruising and bleeding
unshattering, though tell that to the scorekeeper
Once on the field, I hand you a javelin
say, “You know what to do”
ONE OF WAY TOO MANY
I am one of way too many
I shove my plastic into you
The echo informed by the act
Same same same
I am with myself
You are with yourself too
Licking the spewel from it
Trees flux the sunbeams into a clamoring
The souciant blame the insouciant
for the aftermath
or rather the math after the clamorers
have excavated their voices and tongues
placed them in the niches of their personalities
Spewel ignited once again
My tongue laps at it
It doesn’t add up
There is nothing to console the baby
suckling the wound
I sit in silence
awaiting the moment
that God ceases to speak
through the wrong mouth
TEMPLE / WONDERLAND
I watched a film where the closed captioning was always one line ahead of its actors
That’s emotion: the gun jumping the shark
The elevator stuck between floors
The little bit of God stuck inside us all
A splinter working its way out of a calloused thumb
Daniel Bailey is the author of several books poetry, most recently A Better Word for the World (Apocalypse Party, ‘21). He lives and teaches in Athens, Georgia, where he continues to revise his bio.