David A. Welch



Conversation on the Mountain

Bronzing under
hills moon says
something other

Speaking of
and of
no heart-word

Attention's prayer
seen sly behind
word grills

Fractal mon-
strance & star-die
scaling to

Black
hole in iris Lu-
ger blue



Between the Lines

Finger-ghosts dis-
solve to typeface
when placed on the key of
one poem unwriting me

Winnowed words release
surplus threads of to be
breath-space bends to
thought like a reed



Inventory

Too late your realize
life bleeds out
all this time.

Who you might have been
hurries after, catching
it without hands.



Dream Audit

The worries in their thin black ties
gather at my bed in the hours before dawn.
They have assembled the facts and done

the analysis. The residue of troubled sleep
accompanies the précis of their report.
Life is reduced to food, the body

to clothing. The margins are too narrow
for breath. They drop the black binder
with a thump. I lay awake.

I need to fire those guys.



The Hypocrite

Spiritual connoisseur, he could hold forth for hours on the vintage of sanctifying grace. The sound of his own voice intoxicated him, until, weaving into traffic afterward, the graves burst in his ears and the unquiet dead descended like hail into the goblets of his eyes.



Argument

The thing I hate,
I do. Pressing my thumb
on the edge of your
anger, I slide it

down. Now we're both
bleeding when all I
had to do was
let it slide.




David A. Welch is a management consultant with degrees in Journalism and Studies in Literature. His poems have appeared in Dappled Things and E∙ratio.
 
 
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