Poetry by Christopher Mulrooney

Christopher Mulrooney is from Los Angeles.

 His email is lospoesy@earthlink.net

the spin cycle

active positive

couple farewell

Wolfe at the Biennial

reply to a lady

Stars & Stripes Forever

wellsprings and the four winds

of barbarism and its cruelty

The Ragpicker

nonchalance

scene 15

backbite


 

the spin cycle

not many artistic bad questions
hit my mind
when I saw the way things were heading
(says I)
but they went as sure they must
a frightful cap-lidded idiocy
the odd disenchantment and loss
and the bright new boys
gone their way in turn

active positive

she says to me girly here
I don't want to listen
no I mean don't here except actively positively
the face that launched a thousand argosies
arson anyway

couple farewell

what little weenie
in a Japanese waistcoat
obtruding
for these

are those who let me
married guess
screaming like old married folks
and making up

the female version tapping its crotch
on the railing
over the rotten city on a cordless telephone

and male plump-bottom'd jogging
in peroxide


Wolfe at the Biennial

so here we have arrived
at megalopolis

and there at the Whitney Museum
another juried show

and the Hitler analogies
make the Mayor scream
"like an elephant was standing on his pecker"

reply to a lady


well I have written this
since it pleased you
and thank you for showing me
the wound I inflicted on you
which perhaps were not amiss

 

Stars & Stripes Forever

when the grass cools down and
all the info is in
make it
make it happen
you go for the long ball
or maybe you don’t
it’s a lazily idle
afternoon
the long ball goes
and down
 
it goes very far away
and comes down far
of the wide mark here
and you don’t catch it
but the air
doesn’t reckon it
either way
and that hug else
matters a little
that’s the way
the way of not waying
mattering not a little
sinking it in
the long reach
over the yardarms
to the end zone
up and over it goes
and in the end down
to the grass cooling
into info
that goes out
long and deep
for the countdown
the whimsicality of it all

wellsprings and the four winds

I sing of the throne well
I think of it anyway
ukases and edicts
merrygorounds and wellheads
with gabled ends
the water in darkness
plashes and molds
and is replenished
with an aquifer and rain
that falls on the gables
and merrygorounds
with horses
dipping and rising
on their gears and cogwheels
with the music
of the panharmonicon

 

of barbarism and its cruelty

how to beat your whipping cream into a maelstrom
with stainless steel macules o slip of the tongue
a various economical contrivance what is it called
a horse trader’s post out near Lone Pine
the old studios a pindrop commercials hear
the press its freedom industry and its wants
and the wide city abominable and loving-cup ready

The Ragpicker

what are these things
missed and overlooked if not they are things
cooked and booked freshly
antiquarian and mossy-eyed therefore now
let us record them too
hanging by a thread in the sun by
twos and threes sometimes by
ones and twos and sometimes
mysteriously willing at all by
sumptuousness to embark fetchingly
up or down my street
architectured variously
upon a whim or velleity

nonchalance

how wise their children are
who do not know any about
the round-robin silkinesses
and the towering disdain of us

scene 15
o disconsolate in the murmur of thy stream
I like this waste of time o how wonder
is thy true triune stream a-firing
to thy bottomward collaboration fit

backbite

my patience is all exhausted
said the little red hen
I will destroy someone or something
else (or I will destroy calumny
or a calumet) or the Rhode Island Red
or Leghorn a name of Italy I
name a town you name Italy
golden seas blue caves The
Leaning Tower of Pisa leans
more and more each day says
The National Geographic Society
or someone else not what it
used to be in the good old days
when FDR bought off the rack
a war map for the chair he sat in
to confess or protest I mean POTUS