Poetry Collection of Nathaniel S. Rounds

Imitation Salvation

Spiderman comes in a Candy stick

Healing comes in a Methadone bus

Mother comes in a memory

All of it is short-lived

With a bitter aftertaste

That kicks you in the Head

I choose to walk down Artz Street

Watch the self-aware step Into

Micro cars and melt into

Waterfront highway

Your golden necklace with Gifts from the sea

Are a cargo crate away

I just have to lift it With my boom truck

Reach through rusty holes

And feel for promise

But something bites when I grab the prize

Petunia (Red)

It has never been easy to Wear this crazy cry Called

Firestorm

Conceived as a terribly Elegant flower

With a need to break the Vicious circle

Before his slender stem Was broken

And when grower and grown Quarreled

It was not with the Present company

It was with their Particular betrayers

Long dead

Like the past by which They were consumed

For you see

When you outrun the Crying madness

And then become overcome By it

You can only crumple like Old paper

In the cold, wet grass

And pray for it to be Over

And to be punctuated by Silence

Eternal

Valid Mover Voids Marvel

Coyly perverse hogs

Use reverse psychology

To dredge up the ideals

Of your mother and father

And serve them to you as

Photographs of important ritual

To be re-enacted

At tri-quarterly meetings

Of the mind when drenched

With dishwater

And soggy echoes of mod revival

It’s Dad’s pair of shades

Used for avoiding Blindness

From an old sun

Schemes by the Slice

I had to cut up my father Into a hundred pieces of Memory of flesh

The heart that motivated Movement was placed in a Jar

With a disconcerted jury Always present, waiting For the jar to crack

And when it did

They could not stop the Heart from falling out

And from rolling out of The room

To the cool breeze of a Spring afternoon

There were other parts of The puzzle

Hands that dealt the Blows that blinded

And that silenced cries Of protest

Or

Feet that ran to freedom From patriarchal Responsibility

And followed the heart

What I discovered is that The cuts divided flesh But not purpose

And that the ill-Conceived will be made Manifest

Even in a bloodied puzzle Of limbs and stratagems

Bio: Nathaniel S. Rounds was born Nathan Klemperer Pirsch in Bromberg Stadt, Posen, Prussia. He immigrated to WichitaFalls, Texas to research the manufacture of steel taco trucks through its city archives. Taking up cluster ballooning, he flew to Boston, Massachusetts and landed on Mike’s City Diner, where he now washes dishes in exchange for free corned beef hash. 

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