Three Poems by Garth Pavell: Her Pet Mouse, April 20, 2010, Just Then

Three Poems
by Garth Pavell

Her Pet Mouse

Her pet mouse
was free to roam
the confines of her room.
Trapped, I said, no more
than we are liberated.

The mouse educated itself
behind senile shelves. I stepped closer,
waded through a scarred 18th century
Germanic prayer book. See the similarity,
she said, between faith and fire?

I drank Harp’s Lager in the afterglow.
Near my feet, Noam Chomsky was being
interviewed on a satellite radio rebroadcast
admitting everything’s crazy as the moon’s
prisoner colored eyes just before the escape.

April 20, 2010

The hammer hollered insulting praise
Deepwater fishing hunted the maze
Till the lights went out
And all we could see
Was neon fire shaped like a tree
Machines everywhere sighed
For the eleven men who died
Like a shark attack bleeding black
Corporate jaws will soon get sacked
But Exxon, too, rose from the dead
With record dividends
Black was born from red
Now Obama’s speech grits its teeth
At the under-regulated fortunes
That rhyme this song
Singing ‘bout country club mentalities
That suddenly want to belong
To a world that sparkles
And salts its steady state of sea
Giving life on earth freedom and liberty
The lesson is clear, we now must steer
Toward the crying sun and wind
Heeding austerity’s mournful cheer

Just Then

Van Gogh swirled a glass of wine,
looking for an idea, an abstraction of particles..
I’ll paint soup, he said, running into the yard
where the lawless sun had been eating his easel.
That evening he poured paint into the great bowl
of night, stirred the fragrance of the bleary-eyed meadows
and brushed moonlight’s long lost hair.
Later on when Van Gogh was taking out the trash
he noticed the depth of dark shadow swimming on a hillside.
The grass is flowing like a river in love, he said, fetching a pad.
All night he traced our intermingling heritage, probing flowers,
resuscitating their keyholes with colorful conversation
across the bendable sphere of our hand me down vision.

The tide was tied. A miraculous duh thundered down.
Inadvertently coaching future string theorists, Van Gogh’s
ingeniously run of the mill portraits reflected the unreflectable
wind, gasping for air, like punctured parachutes whining
ungrammatical truth, giddily drowning in the not so distance..

Garth Pavell received his BA from The New School. He’s worked as a grant writer, horticulturist, businessman, road construction worker, farmhand, musician and teacher. Garth's poems recently appeared in The Battered Suitcase, Right Hand Pointing, Leveler, Orion headless and Xenith and are forthcoming in Canary and The Writing Disorder.

Copyright 2011, Garth Pavell. © This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.