Two Poems by Mike Sammons as left on my voicemail on consecutive Sunday mornings.

All punctuation, linebreaks and stanza breaks are my own. [In brackets are untelligible passages.]

*

I Fell Down

After a long -- very long night
of drinking bourbon and beer,
I came to my door and immediately
fell down at the first step.

These are the days I instantly remember:
God is a bird caught close between the legs;
winter winds round me like a [sick date]
coughing some madness in the nice air.
Trees dance the polka unrestrained
by my methods; some mother
sleeps sound in her bed.

Cigarettes last on my fingers
like gods…of strife.

Run your fingers down your thighs,
take them down your own legs
to your feet: you are a god of lust
and of all things lusty.

I love you like a shooting star
all above me; I lie on a trampoline
making my mistakes the way
we [warn some kids about lies]
and yet fails
on the white gates of Montrose.

*

Restaurant

Actually they don’t come in like wolves,
they come in more like enormous and pointless mannequins
on the lunchtime crowd of miscreants.

Cubicles disperse and weep;
taxis scream without screaming;
the boss stands like a moron waiting
for something that won’t come,
won’t become itself.

There is a man with his wife and his child,
a young boy with big lips and black skin,
and the mother keeps spying all over him
and thinks [he’s a genius or more]
and waits for her meal and ponders
some things I don’t even think about.

The dad’s face shows a jumble of ears
and doesn’t smile or move at all.

I see a doomed corpse in us all:
the father is doomed to at least fourteen years;
the mother is doomed to at least fourteen years;
the earth belches magnetic revelations in kind.

A bad haircut can ruin your life;
a parking ticket can send you to jail,
sitting wildly with the animals
who don’t shout and also don’t front.

Innocence abounds in the accused like a plague:
the dog barking is doomed to fate;
the birds fly like an idiot also.

Where does that end or begin:
yourself, your own child, a rogue,
an entire imbecile.

[Just to reassure] our kids, more
morons than we,
I open the bottle with a tool,
and sink my lips over the same glass mouth
till the draining, delving mind
sinks itself into the start which [is hard.]

The winds will find themselves virgin,
and the sky will mask itself like an owl.

I stand thinking “no, this is not my life,
this is not the life I wanted, this is just
not my life.”

Some are doomed to dust, others are doomed
to lust and to other things. Some are doomed
to happiness and comedy.

I will stay with the doomed of the doomed.