“[The] street is on roller skates” warns Jack Tricarico in poetry that psychedelically captures the rich overflow of language and image in the perpetual motion machines of world and consciousness. Nothing is as seems, or as the poet puts it “These are my zeros.”
Words and art by: Jack Tricarico
SOPRANIC TENSION
I sweat off the insects
In other people’s heads
Those, especially
Who are only heard by the air
Along for a walk
Paradise comes out of a supermarket
Eager to build its own jungle
Around somebody’s lost shoe
How one stray step
Heaps into immobility
How someone’s exposed navel
Interminably winds
The geography of uncertainty there
“It’s the heat!” Meows a cat
With its cartoon face
I will return to her later
Her shadow stuck to my foot
So I wake up
And the street is on roller skates
I have one hundred and one personalities
That want to be killed for no reason
I have a centrifugal eye
And a centripetal one
I remember a child who ate worms
Occupying an adult absence
At the general post office
Was arrested for eating the mail
I am ten children with chop suey hands
An accountant’s brain of disarranged decimals
A four cornered dog
Claiming to be the Holy Father
Oh bogus eternity of Platonic parking meters
Don’t become the cement
Of the backward falling rain
Today is apple strudel day
Someone is fondling himself
By a bakery window
Complaining of being followed
By an advertisement
Look at that cloud shaped like a tail of smiles
The traffic unzippering the damp
Voluptuously glossing a girl’s back
Smoking her crooked cigar
OVERHAUL
A singer claimed ecstasy
Relieved her of weight watcher’s angst
Brutish hands tore off
Her thoughtful dress. Meanwhile
The patched, ceiling light
Dripped like declining slush
Seen by a cramped brain
In between two crosses
Cuddled wall
The appropriate ooze
And a sketchy vignette
These are my zeros
An unemployed score
For whom a blue elixir
Will develop without charge
Or grimy taxation
Hey, street! Tired of hiding
In whirlpool effects?
Sending your rooftops
To glide with the clouds?
Submerging your windows
In afternoon blahs?
Dumping your doorways
With mail on the steps?
Rescue this face
Of pedestrian pink
With a little brown
And a little black
Beware of the nondescript
The lure of the selfless self
Trapped in their clothes
Trapped in their rent
And listen to night owls
That talk in their sleep:
“I’d never take a laxative
That’s bad for the plumbing!
When my mother hears voices
She always starts humming!
Are there drugs I can take
For this habitual rhyming?”
I say stay as you are
Aware of your atoms
The creases in dust motes
On another side of the world
Someone is looking
For family remains
The rain is about to stop
Jack Tricarico is a New York City painter and poet who has been published in poetry journals and anthologies in the United States and Europe. He has completed 10 chapbooks and is working on his 11th. Some of the publications his work has appeared in are Hunger Magazine, Home Planet News, Asbestos, Nomad’s Choir, Dinner With The Muse, Exit Strata, The Venetian Hour, I Let Go Of The Stars In My Hand, and Anima magazine. His art work can be seen on: www.nyaw.com.
Header art is by the incredibly talented Christopher Hayden.
