If each one of Anthony Liccione’s poems could create an actual, human presence, and if you could keep all of these strange, fascinating characters in one place, the result would be something like touring an insane asylum with enough madness to bring the walls down again and again.
Pinned to a spinning board
Like a human butterfly
The blades come so close
They whisper in her ear
Of course they removed my skull
and retooled it as a font.
Then they stretched and smoked my face
above a wood fire. They sewed it
around a tough little fistful
of brain-pulp spiced with preservatives.
All night, pages turn as old books
read themselves over and over.
Their intelligence rises to mate
with the cosmic dark matter
that empowers nothing but fills
the gaps between great moments
of supernova.
The big hand, slaps her
in the face with her own mortality.
“Tick tick tick” says the whining time bomb
screaming, “Faster doll faster.
Run, in heels, little darling”
Women in trench coats do not ask me for favors.
And, hey,
hey, hey,
take my word for it.
beaming from a stage
this darling
pulchritudinous
rock guitarling
citizen of underworlds
I baptise my hands for fear of bad luck
Constantly bathing them with curses
I dump my lover for fear of being alone
In case she abandons me
I drink excessively for fear I drink
Far too much for my own good
She existed in enclosed sets,
In scenes she would never have put herself in.
Looking out at a world she had no part in,
Trapped behind the screen in a perpetual past,
Played over and over in black and white;
The audience completely in the dark
As to the reality that involved her.
She would glide effortlessly,
Lead him through the more complex moves,
Discreetly push the chairs aside,
Through the evenings slow eclipse
The one long, lingering kiss.