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Copyright © 2007 Dave Bruzina and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 

Poems 

 
Dave Bruzina 

 

 

Boom 

 

From the scattergun blinds in the fields, there’s a near constant boom and crackle. 

Flocks of men, in suits, in the clouds, have been scaring the rain away. 

Righteous resentment is one thing, cannibalism another! 

I pity both those with no well 

and those just trying to fly over,  

ties fluttering, a little mist 

 beading—before being struck off by the wind— 

on the bright calf-skin of their briefcases. 

 

 

 

The Committee Dissolves 

 

 

Unable to bear, for example, a red scarf tossed down on a white bed spread 

(a flash of blood on napkins there in his bedroom!), 

unable to live near schools where children shrieking on the playground 

made him crouch in his sleep, 

 

he slept between meals or watched the neon tetras 

in the tank in his living room, feeding them one crumb at a time, taking hours, 

allowing the school of five to settle before offering another fleck 

on the tip of a plastic toothpick.  He talked to them, 

 

until they began to talk back.  He grinned, that first occasion, speechless 

with gratitude, his eyes wet.  Soon, he knew them all by voice— 

his favorite, Ginger, had the clipped upright accent of a fifties female movie star, 

American and archaic.  He began to wonder— 

 

because he’d noticed people more frequently saying on TV, 

“God spoke to me….” (the President was doing it, for example)— 

how does one know that that is God talking? 

He liked to think God might be speaking to him through his fish, 

 

through Ginger, Ginger, Ginger, Ginger, Ginger, 

or the whole school speaking in chorus, one Voice, participating 

in the arrangements of things in his living room, in his kitchen, telling him 

to adjust the blinds because look!  there!  see?  isn’t that nicer light? 

 

That it was was a kind of evidence.  Why shouldn’t he be running their errands? 

Answering their phones?  Spending his credit card on-line, 

buying, among other things, barrels of filtered water, propane, shotguns, slug shells, 

concrete, Plexiglas, silicon caulking, and a flat-bed truck?