Larry D. Thacker’s poetry can be found or is forthcoming in more than ninety publications including The Still Journal, Poetry South, Tower Poetry Society, Mad River Review, Spillway, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Mojave River Review, Mannequin Haus, Ghost City Press, Jazz Cigarette, and Appalachian Heritage. His books include Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia and the poetry books, Voice Hunting and Memory Train, as well as the forthcoming, Drifting in Awe. He’s presently working on his MFA in both poetry and fiction. Visit his website at: www.larrydthacker.com
***
1. Hey, man
I trust you, but
some things
I’d never do again,
like cage fighting
that face-tattooed
three-armed Brazilian,
or filming my indie project
on snake-handling
at the Church
of the Near-Sighted
in the middle of winter
just because “Iffy Sammy”
wanted to meet that stripper
from Logan’s House
of Half-Priced Steaks.
I’m still healing, but
aren’t we all?
And we’re too long gone
from that church
to turn around now,
so let’s live
with our scars.
Snake bites,
broken ankles
from ill-installed,
rusty dance poles,
and food poisoning,
and having to live
with never
finishing that film.
***
2. The Study: A
Study
With the few fandangles and trumperies aside,
it was cramped airless with strewn work-a-bouts,
a dust-caught trappage in its allotment of curiosities,
arranged in thoughtlessness, all of it dulled up
sinisterly into an ill-lit roomage entirely meant
for constancy of work rather than entertaining guests.
The obsessed poet appeared drowning in his environ,
afloat about the desk and chair, clutched to life,
doubtlessly challenging an onlooker’s opinion
as whether such vastness, the angular sea of volumes
and trinkets, had, in fact, created the man, or
whether the man was accountable for the morass.
Either way, the commitment was obvious, the man
now an extension of his workplace, near camouflaged
but for the twitch-workings of a crazed penning hand,
his blinking, bloodshot eyes, the scratch paper shift,
his never-ceasing lips in whisper of what he thought
heard sliding pulsed from the mind to his famed
stacked verses on what floor was available, the being’s
wracked physical form but a catalyst for artful abuse.
Visiting the creature was to make foray into a jungle,
walled as it was away from the world like a menagerie
of the lost by virtue of the fellow’s misjudged wishes,
remaining chained in singleness of heart another soul
in such an obsessed state might only fathom, yet never
disclose under the self-muting weight of knowledge.