SELECTED
POETRY
by Michael Paul Ladanyi

'TO BLOW NUMB'

there is hoodoo-tongue violence
in your hope-taunt eyes, jacob.
you will come back home again,
machine-red-twisted, a portioned
thing hung hum-splintered upon itself,
like orange water-drug fingers.

i thought i saw you tuesday,
in hunch-white limbs, acorn-moss
soil beside a winter-oak sidewalk,
like sun/knife/insane/turning.

there is a twig-stone place out back
where tenor crows lung-crunch
gray january mornings, where acoustic
wind refuses to blow numb,
like edified smiles through cigarette smoke.

below lies your box of hero-torn eyes,
your 52 reasons to hang yourself and live.
i have walked there, jacob,
where serpentine kudzu was burned,
nude and diseased.

� Michael Paul Ladanyi

Reproduced with permission

---

'SHIVER FILM'

I thought to call Patricia this
morning and talk about shiver-film
street children of Bangladesh,
instead I watched blue pillow-reversed
smoke rise burning from a cigarette,

/listened to my heart grow sick/
/become traffic-paint rain against a tin roof/
/thoughts about heavily perfumed whores/

Way down, trickling as ocean-scratched
chatter washed sharp, green-piano-
key-words are brothers buried
beneath profitable black,
sun-coughing metal godfucking,
everything that is like sand
on cleaved neck-tongues.

War is a glass bottled ship/
is naked insanity/
is silver suns fisheye-hooked;
most of the children will
stop shivering when they die.

� Michael Paul Ladanyi