Two Poems by Walter Ruhlmann

Panting

It felt like the sky would freeze,
a single sneeze would fracture it,
blue glass shatters and falls all over the place--
translucent debris.

Eavesdropping on the heavens, we feel doomed
when no one here can handle the hum
coming from above--though shallow and dim
yet implacable.

The shelter in the shadow of the mountains
resembles any homes, absolves the sins
characteristic of the people around here--
insatiable loons.




Obfuscating Windows

Fog and drizzle invade this moss covered, rocky land,
they smash against the glazing, the lining, all parts of
these obfuscated windows, hiding unfathomable affairs

The swollen self takes over anything else again,
it swells up like a lump full of greenish pus
mixed with blood, rotten hematocrits,
an empyema, until it bursts and ejactulates
its disgusting plasma all over the place,
like popping a pimple between two fingers,
messing the immaculate looking glass in the bathroom.

Everything comes back to liquid, to fluidity,
grease and pump:  a heart panting, ready to explode.
The ocean, the carnival, the ponds are far away though,
remote in time, aloof on maps, but still flooding your memories,
lava erupting from a giant crater, opening wide under your feet,
engulfing anything, especially the faith, or the remains of it rather.
Erupting like the sperm the leprechaun wanted lately.

Cub-wolf was not a game, not a pass-time, not even a hole,
a booby-trap and it would have made everything go astray,
discordant, destructive, suicidal, deadly--decorative in a way.

Walter Ruhlmann works as an English teacher, edits mgversion2>datura and runs mgv2>publishing.  His latest collections are The Loss through Flutter Press, Twelve Times Thirteen through Kind of a Hurricane Press, and Crossing Puddles through Robocup Press, 2015.  His blogs http://thenightorchid.blogspot.fr and http://nightorchidswork.blogspot.fr