Two Poems by Colin Dodds

The Patron Saint of Transitions

The toothless man in a cowboy hat

collects the bottles off the tables.

“I’m tired kids,

I woke up before you were born,” he says.

He’ll tell you about when the year had 360 days.

The bartenders give him soda and quarters

for the pool table.

He gets an ideal spot to wait

for his luck to change.

Scary Silent Prayer

Above us patrons, lost in our devotions

to the blather, the stunt and the oily coast, 

a mood stitches the horizon down.

It is not dramatic, one more failure.

But it takes a thousand failures

to make a person, and a few billion people

to make us feel like this.

And god all muddy, here we are.

“What I do to entertain myself

is just that, what I do.

But all the while,

what I’ve really had in mind was…”

someone croons into the space

between jukebox songs.

Fraud our fodder,

give me something to say

to the man on my left, the woman by the door

and the bartender before me.

Anything except the scary silent prayer

that becomes the floors and doors

of this room.

Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City.  He's the author of several novels, including The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing "something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people."  Dodds' screenplay, Refreshment -- A Tragedy, was named a semi-finalist in 2010 American Zoetrope Contest.  His poetry has appeared in more than ninety publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Samantha.