Two Poems by Tom Riot

Changeling

 

She says i am changing

We are all changing

Copper pennies turning green

We are all oxidizing under the bacteria

 

She talks to me like

I am alone and crazy

Like I am infantile and infatuated

She cannot separate my saturated emotions

 

“Why?” I ask the walls and the ugly curtains

The air and the pollution that surrounds me,

It trenches in and burdens my already muddy masks,

stakes my tasks more curious and less courteous

 

“What did you say?” Her words are spilling in like star light,

too blinding, too fast

For my slow digestion, my discretions warning

and working, threatening to spill out on this cold tile floor

 

My feet are cold and I am staring at them

Yellow Lemons rolling on the floor, towards the open door

To the bedroom, dirty sheets and rolled jeans, old soles

I want to crawl under the bed hide from your thoughts

 

 

 

Rules of Spring

 

I sit in my black metal chair

under my tree, spring breeze and all

the kids are rowdy rough in the back

wrestling around bright ideas, I hear them like harmonies.

 

A young Mocking Bird is sitting on my old fence

He jumps off and steals a berry from the tree

Flying in mid-air to snatch the small blue ball

Then back to the perch eating happily

 

White down feathers show his age

But something else strikes me

He is not scared of me, only 5 feet away,

He is naive to us humans

 

He doesn’t know this animal

He doesn’t know who we are

How we hate and hurt and take and turn

everything into what we want it to be, he doesn’t know.

 

The clouds are scattered today like

They don’t know who is in charge

and I join the club.

Who am I to have that bird’s trust, I wonder?

 

I move too quickly and he spooks and flutters

Like I was so quick, so spry and light

but my 200 pound frame is better suited for

Concrete and carpentry, not midair bird catching.

 

The day is waning and my hands are tired

and my arms are tired and this smoke tastes good

thick tea leaves and lemon

like turmoil untwisted, I can’t resist it I know.

 

The bird flitters back stealing berries again

I watch for a minute, pissed, why can’t he trust me?

I yell loud like a lunatic bear and jump up running

He flies away and I sit back down, light and write.

 

 

 

Tom Riot was born in a small California town. He is 42 years old.