Discography of the Weekend Flight Over the New Ruins

They bobbed by without remark
through spurs and clumps of gray
that brought up somehow the teepee potion I
concocted for a party I
orchestrated in 1983 that cost me
a friend and June
rent thirty years later.

Or was it a babble that we mistook
for a flood or that spur we thought was
the missing tea?

Whirring by we felt geography offered
us commitment
when really it barely touched the epic
at hand.

Even the costumes played a dirty part
by denying us our eyes.

Thing is all the switches and false
falsettos returned
the earth to an earlier time with griffin
and cocks and Mr. Venerable.

And an earlier time is rarely not the favored time.

I have always preferred a Germany
over a Japan or a comparison over
admittance of a certain uniqueness
where uniqueness is no longer an
impossibility

all signs of the time when butter no longer works
on bread or rhymes
spoil otherwise lovely lines
that could have been unblemished
in some less unthoughtful way.

Copyright 2008
Aaron Cohen
Reprinted with Permission from Self

Motherandum

Motherandum
by Aaron Cohen

Mothers:
Years have passed me by like
gray bodies dragged to the water
by bulls and walking birds.

Bullets.

Other years were different.
All cruel.

In my head: bodies piled high
enough to make another bridge and
thirty years later we have all crossed
so many, leaving the dead
in the wake.

Together: we hit the road, in light, our
shoes bleeding through milk
and wine.

The truck that hit me was hauling
groceries to all of them. It kissed
my arched thumb as it careened by

Left me standing there facing the
wrong way but for several minutes
I was saved.

All Rights Reserved 2008.
Do not reprint without Author's Permission.

Enough

Thanks to all the pretty girls with their soft
eyelashes and long drips of sweat
on their backs and fifty-dollar hairdos
and handjobs and for resurrecting

the working man from his dead
place on the sofa he found so cozy

just last year after the funeral

that caused so much tenderness.
Enough to make any man question

fundamentally why not just plant yourself

and rest here the rest of your life?

He was full of infection, loud and blistering

when she took him in, and when she left

it was a fire burning in her eyes

and the infection was all hers.

by Aaron Cohen
copyright 2008
Not to Be Reprinted without Permission