Poetry By David Pitcher

Peter Karlsson CC




Smoking

I used to pop packs on the heel of my hand,
Rip the foil lip back and smell the sticks:
Normally brown sugar and earth on the nose.

Freud’s Thanatos in fumes, toes over the ledge,
Sick incense sent in spirals at the night.
We drank the wind and held it in our hearts.

Safe in the country of our youth
We sent smoke to the gods
And like Alcyoneus we left our home,
Losing what we thought was eternity
And paying out time, the tax on our thousand fires.

​




Storyteller

The moon moves the waters
and presses them, folding the sea,
pulling the metal in my body to a frenzy
with his cycles and arcs.

And though he looks at us
on the futon in the living room
with his blue smirk and night shirt,
he is no person.

He cannot speak, 
cannot put meaning and names
on matter, making them real.
For all his turning he cannot call.

There is a story about a modern seanchaí
who spoke the world in full color
but walked the needle road we rode
until his arms turned black like the moon’s
blanket. I see he is a star now,
hung in the dark. I see he has also lost
his voice to the huge night,
turned from a god into the sky’s newest light.

​


David Pitcher is an Indiana poet and shelter worker who has been featured on NPR’s The Poets Weave. His poetry is forthcoming in The Wheel and has appeared in LETTERS, The Pedestal Magazine, Confluence and elsewhere.


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