Area Hospital / Girl Shy (1924)
Brandon Downing

"Don't freak with me! I do not float,"
Fatuous bogeyman, called Captain.
Articles can't futurize Russia's people.

Suddenly your house has its own name,
And a graduate student tends to your flowers.
Ruffian boys in makeup puff upon their whistles
                                       in silence.

What deep waifs brazenly parade
Near the doors to the factory?
They owe you everything, but shriek
                                       at your taste…

So I gave the college boy the sack,
And he stomped out of the garden
With his long fur coat and the pennant.

If ye be my sweetheart, rake in a dungeon,
Be a sweet gangly doll like that—
Hilarious spankings & eyebrow downturnings

_________________________________

Trapped by a whistler between 2 cars,
Choked by the beast.
If I will be killed if I fall, who would
Not be completely petrified by this trouble?

My sheik flips absently, through a mound of dark underwear,
Before meeting finally with Valerie at Le Mule
And the tunnels in her curls. Who stops it?
Not with such a glowing signifier, there, in the swamp.

Harps, not the typical cackle, accompany it.
A lost craft, a flying bullet, a alligator.
Tulips, yet not the animal kind.
Open them and see my seizures. Oh, mixture!

© Brandon Downing