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.