3 Poems by D.M. Rice

Having a Beer with You

  This year Saint Sebastian’s day
seemed more significant, and the loose
gravel firmament that buttressed our  
steps was clear and crisp. Need
I remind you of this disease 
of abstraction, always making postulate
kingdoms of ends from ephemera, liner
notes and marginal scrawling reminders 
to cede attention, water spout 
confessions all at once, or none
at all to make comparison in
the consumptive marketplace of 
platonic ideology. Guilty again. In
the candelabra foyer, smiling in 
your phone, or waltzing white
rock, barely able to contain the 
beauty for the bitter cold
; arrows, or stigmata, you can
have your way with my sliding
scale , the threshold of my expectations 
mounted, made real, dissolution in 
a bright lit, public frame, I press
the heart, endorphins and the pulse
of continuity, not a break in 
 the pattern, but its culmination, 
 to drink the gold leaf of mesopotamia
, or even to imagine myself now, 
 pressed against your lips, sweeter
 than the world may ever know.

On Absence

The predilection of consciousness–how 
to make sense of the corporeal world
with a structural conceit that is meta 
-physical in nature, dark matter enigma 
or the dandelion fluff of thought
, known only in passing as to emph
-asize the imposition of the void, 
free turns at the slot machine, a
mechanical stricture which does not 
preclude the dissolution of its own
premises, singing to the revolution: oh 
where, oh where, oh where shall 
I be – shipping and handling not 
included , and cogency demures belief 
  ; 
the ride is serendipitous, click 
clacking juts the boxcar demarcates
materiality like the world clock, an 
arbitrary imposition on the necessary 
semaphore of opportunity cost, ubiquitous 
preclusion in the foregone theater of 
imagination: tonight, no throwing roses 
or marking the occasion with wine 
and canapes, breathe hollow the as
-thmatic depth of cultural loss, being 
no more or less fundamental than 
precision, metrics of uncertainty in the
cultural gas chamber, seraphim denoting 
aberration and deformity , as if to postulate
our love : not defined by presence but 
arbitration , performativity as a philosophical 
construct to live and breathe my ferrofluid 
truth , organizing material structures in the 
a priori sophistry of form 
    ; 
      bound 
Prometheus of my self-conceit, all 
roads of dawn, fire, rosy allusive 
 London, no more near or far, in 
-distinct structure of this room, my 
 feeble mind to speak your presence through
 negation, and weigh like Anubis my dis
-tant friend’s theology of lack

Winter Requiem

Comparison truly is the thief of joy
when my goose is cooked, and wild
flocks of parakeets smile Mary Oliver

You do not have to be
, good or bad, for stolen time
conducts the hours in delicate
arbitration

The grief of my indignity
past the projected tunnel vision
toward the precepts of open doors

Come in , come in!
Are you cold?
I would carve my body hollow
for to bring you warmth to stave
the winter snow.