Two Poems by Kyle Hemmings

Aug 20th, 2011 | By | Category: Poetry

Can I Borrow Your Laconic Giraffe Because My Laughing Hyena Keeps Stealing My Fruit of the Loom
 
I would never compare
you to a cookie
falling from the sky
a pure Oreo
or a virgin Lorna Doone,
unbitten, only flaky at the edges,
me, running to catch you
before you crumble.
 
But that’s exactly
what happened last night
at the Venus Without Furs.
You downed five Pied Pipers
& three Lip-Splints
extra stiff.
You performed some
highly personal interpretations
of the Amnesiac’s Lumbago
& The Stalking Cat.
Then you went dancing
barefoot on the tables
singing two minute
memoirs of your torrid
life under Capricorn.
You kept falling.
I kept raising my arms.
We both kept missing
the chorus.
 
 
Hold Back the Dawn
 
It was a 50’s sci-fi flick
about a brain-injured astronaut
who kept dreaming of having
sex with aliens in craters
3 miles deep, the shape of an eye.
Instead he met a double-headed woman
at a bar. When he fed her
his best pick-up line,
one head said “You’re lying.”
The other said “You’re cute
for a single head. But I always
had a thing for the handicapped.”
He said he felt weightless, pulled towards
the illogic of mass and density,
rambled on how humans are like
all red angry planets. In time,
they will burst. “The planets?”
asked the woman’s one head. “No,
the humans,” said the head that
was more logical.
 
In bed that night, the astronaut
and the double-headed woman
studied the ceiling.
“There’s no stars for us,” he said,
“people with modular lives would
mock us. They like their saucers flat
and their tea cups with handles.”
The double-headed woman
turned towards him. “Let them
eat cake,” said the one head.
“He doesn’t have an illegal
gram of common sense,” said the other.
For the rest of the night,
the two heads fought over the
astronaut who had a faulty medulla
who kept saying he wanted
a double Medea.

————

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. When drunk, he tells people he’s the poet Laureate of the Westfield Train Station.

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