Three Poems / by Seth Garben


This Sunday Last
 

This Sunday last, whilst reckoning
The quiddity of everything
That I beheld that Saturday
A bird collided with my pane:
And like a fireball from some
Empyrean, everlasting sun
It torched the earth ‘pon its descent,
To disrupt all my merriment.
The ground alit with engulfing glow:
The trees above, and roots below
Bowed and rose, respectively,
In deference to a divinity.

Strange thing it is, yes, to behold
What death to birds does really show:
That all my isolated thought,
Will keep me safe when hell is wrought.

 

 

 

 

Raw Meat
 

Raw meat
Freshly bought not two days ago
Kept, mindlessly, in the first story of a two story
Refrigerator—the cold but not cold in extremis
Story—was found, by hands and eyes
To be gray on the inside.

Oxygen, it seems, not only inspires life
In God’s creatures, inclusive of pilgrims sojourning
From this world to the next, upstairs and downstairs,
The asthmatic, the chainsmoker, methaddict, whitecracker,
Sweatshopper, roadpaver, tracklayer, yeoman, fisherman,
Manchild, girlchild, Rothschild, Julia Child,
priest-beast-least-feast-deceased-greased-pieced-creased-fleeced
angelssweepingchimneysinpreparationforchristmasfireburninggewgaws
babies screaming, howling, mewling, nipping, sipping, gripping,
choirs singing, ringing, listeners cringing,
and the redeemer fingering his book of life—

but fucks up my dinner plans once again.

 

 


 


Drano


just in the kick of time, fast out the door:
ululating, savagely in primality, the first howls—
lover, lover please, you need this more than I need you, which is verily the insurmountable pinnacle of my existence.
eventually I will die, you will die, we will die, they, too, will die - all except the ululation, which extends interminable I know this to be true.

real, and I emphasize, real knowing is attendant to a psychosis unprecedented before the age of us.
even dumb silly monkey-fucking-monkeys understand an irreproachable, unapproachable nullity, why can't we dumb silly human-fucking-monkeys do the same? rephrase that anyway you like, retain its essence. 
nix the prattle, I turn into a reversed vacuum when it comes to prognostications, pedantry: let’s
hush up. kiss the curviform of my spine.
again the car sputter-sputter-tot-tot—when again to see lover? when again to hear lover? when again to return to, perhaps never, fifteen minutes? Double down on the latter, we are like clockwork. Put it all on red and black, and blue.

really I must get a better metaphor for the cataclysm that is our amour.

drano

how about that one?
 

 

 

 

Seth Garben is a Los Angeles-based writer, playwright, and filmmaker. His plays have been produced on Northwestern University's main and student stages, and have garnered runners-up nominations at the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference. He is the writer, director, and producer of web series Donny and Carl and the short films Out of Here and The Dog, the former of which was an official selection at the Los Angeles Comedy Festival.