Jordan Stempleman



     String Parade


  1.

Anybody aught to make

sense, promise and confess to

their friends, tend a garden,

dig up a warm one, dig up

some filth sincerity

to answer how they feel.



  2.

I remember, or at least

I don’t have to, a rule is

for dishonesty. Dare it

away to where it might not come

back to anything at all.



  3.

There are some who will say, if

I see you, and it happens

that I lose my will, sit where

I am supposed to talk, ask

you the time without going

anywhere, it’s because there’s

a struck stretch from my inside

that’s fallen around your feet.



  4.

There is a star that has

a pact with its melting site. It

is troubled by three day old

snow, sudden warmth, the return

of birds it’s coldly outgrown.





     A Monster


Many times, fussy once outside of the house, the common pleasures returned
and went about marking up the lawn with a dropped assembly, nature well
and gone. And after some time of bending over, cleaning up deposits

of neglected galaxies, there was nothing more to wait for— contention
there are beds and softer days, rocks who seem to care and consider why
they were left out over nights to contend with the ever rolling weather.

It's true, you have married a criminal. He is gentle without his heart
and dedicated to the extremes of affect found from slipped words, roads
unnamed now from street signs stolen and tossed by boys

into drainage sewers, and the sleep that comes before fully peeling
the tangerine for his daughter. What comes to mind while alive,
most of the time, is made entirely for the world. The rest that enters, moves to ends

that soak up the massive burning plains designated neither at disease
nor health. And so, the glow from this side is faint. The club it carries,
to one day become the shoulder, is barely enough to rest on the shoulder,

unreal as the chapped skin beneath wigs. Dear the airless and those feelings
of going for the doubled, the briefest advance from someone doing
what they can, is what we call real exercise. The blue look of staring directly into

another face as the stoop goes dark and the approaching limits of walking, just
normally walking, fold up their locks for sights unseen, knowing there are tolls to look
at two people growing dim. Hands, now becoming faces, forever possibly there.








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