Fowlpox Press © MMXIII Nathaniel S. Rounds All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-1-927593-18-9

Imitation Salvation, Petunia

(Red),Valid Mover Voids

Marveland Schemes by the Slice

were originally published by

Mel BrakE Press.

Nathaniel S. Rounds

Imitation Salvation Spiderman comes in a Candy stick Healing comes in a Methadone bus Mother comes in a memory All of it is short-lived With a bitter aftertaste That kicks you in the Head I choose to walk down Artz Street Watch the self-aware step Into Micro cars and melt into Waterfront highway Your golden necklace with Gifts from the sea Are a cargo crate away I just have to lift it With my boom truck Reach through rusty holes And feel for promise But something bites when I grab the prize

Petunia (Red)

It has never been easy to Wear this crazy cry Called Firestorm Conceived as a terribly Elegant flower With a need to break the Vicious circle Before his slender stem Was broken And when grower and grown Quarreled It was not with the Present company It was with their Particular betrayers Long dead Like the past by which They were consumed For you see When you outrun the Crying madness

And then become overcome By it You can only crumple like Old paper In the cold, wet grass And pray for it to be Over And to be punctuated by Silence Eternal

Valid Mover Voids Marvel Coyly perverse hogs Use reverse psychology To dredge up the ideals Of your mother and father And serve them to you as Photographs of important Ritual To be re-enacted At tri-quarterly meetings Of the mind when drenched With dishwater And soggy echoes of mod revival It’s Dad’s pair of shades Used for (a)voiding Blindness From an old sun

Schemes by the Slice I had to cut up my father Into a hundred pieces of Memory of flesh The heart that motivated Movement was placed in a Jar With a disconcerted jury Always present, waiting For the jar to crack And when it did They could not stop the Heart from falling out And from rolling out of The room To the cool breeze of a Spring afternoon There were other parts of The puzzle Hands that dealt the Blows that blinded And that silenced cries Of protest Or

Feet that ran to freedom From patriarchal Responsibility And followed the heart What I discovered is that The cuts divided flesh But not purpose And that the ill-Conceived will be made Manifest Even in a bloodied puzzle Of limbs and stratagems

Michael and John Get Their Flashback On Two kids play in the same Puddle Puddle has gasoline Rainbow sheen We have welfare rags and Unselfconsciousness We have God as Dad We have crossing guard as Shelter We have two different Mothers Who ate penny candy Between hunger sandwiches While they carried us in Their bellies Mary and Liz And we just entered this Ragged scene With the second-hand Smoke and the gasoline (Leaded like Lucifer who Fathered us both) With a hunger for words As song

3669 Vertinskij There is an asteroid up In the sky Shining over Russians in Shanghai Serving up stars that Form pictures Of fine dining at a Tropical hotel Put to rest after the Finale With Pierrot's doleful Ditties And dawn’s harsh light

Nathaniel S. Rounds, known by his immediate family and close friends as Frankie Baby, is described as the father of the Popsicle™ Theory, which goes something like this: Imagine that you have an orange flavoured Popsicle™ in your hand. It is a hot day in August in the midwestern United States. You decide to drop the Popsicle on the sidewalk and turn your back on it. At what point does it cease to exist?