Three Poems by Rob Plath: Once Far From the Finishing Line, Unglittery Mute Innards, Cuffed To Your Own Muscle

Three Poems
by Robert Plath

Once Far From the Finishing Line

It's muggy and hot, at 9:33 P.M., the end of July.

Green-white light of fireflies flashing in the trees
as the cherry of my cigarette intermittently winks back at them.

And although I am uncomfortably warm, a soft spot remains
in the aging chambers of my heart for even hotter summers past .

How in that historical heat this shape was so young
and loved through the unbearable haze of it all.

Do the hazy waves of flaming summers past ever make you want to sit
on the floor and rock because the sun once burned the skin
of your shoulder blades and the tip of your nose while you were in love
and your heart galloped easier--far, far, from the finishing line?

Unglittery Mute Innards

People are really flesh pinatas moving about on the planet.

Most are packed with plastic petty rings and kazoos that play only tunes
of bullshit.

They constantly take cracks at one another and gather the windfall of
these so-called prizes.

If you look around you can see them taking turns hitting each other's
shapes. They call it Love.

Some people are filled with only bones.

Most of the others fear this and run after they split them open and see
the drab spillage.

The lonely ones gather their unglittery mute innards and suture them
back up inside, continuing
to try and maneuver through the maze of sparkly superficiality and
buzzing lies.

Cuffed To Your Own Muscle

In a way, the blood pressure cuff
is worse than handcuffs.

To know that you are prisoner
to a part within.

One with empty chambers
but that can explode anytime,

or send the blood so forcefully
through ribbon thin corridors

that they finally rupture,

leaving you like a fucking
dying geranium in a planter.

Rob Plath, a former student of Allen Ginsberg, has seven chapbooks of poetry out: Ashtrays & Bulls (Liquid Paper Press 2003), An IV Bag Full of Bile (Scintillating Publications 2007), Whiskey & Clay (Pudding House Publications 2008), Squeezing Blood from the Alphabet(erbacce press 2008), Tapping Ashes in the Dark (Lummox Press 2008), There's a Little Hobo in My Heart Who Forever Gives the Finger to Humanity (d/e/a/d/b/e/a/t press 2008), and Nicotine Scribblings from a Hammock in the Void (Good Japan Press 2009). Epic Rites Press released two anthologies of his work, A Bellyful of Anarchy and There's a Fist Dunked in Blood Beating in My Chest. His novella, Swallowtude, is due out next year under Epic Rites Press.

Copyright 2011, Rob Plath. © 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.