3 Poems by Samuel Smith

Photo Album: Venezia, 1562

Here we are dancing
in Piazza San Marco.
Pigeons, more pigeons,
a churning bile of gray snow.
And Pulcinella –
we laughed until our throats hurt.
Here's Cassio and
that silly whore Bianca
kissing, downstairs by
the well in the Ca' d'Oro.

Black armor of the sky.
Iago, his smile like a sheath.


Kitsune's Wedding

Sign of good fortune:
rain falling from sunny skies.
Be not proud, Kensei.

In infinite universes once
Musashi said: her dual nature ruptured
the world in threes: Trickster, Mother, Crone.

Nine-tailed Kitsune
smiles like a will-o-the-wisp,
skips into the wood.



Coderain
    When two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion. – Philip K. Dick

1.
Tecumseh bade the leaves to speak.
Code talkers raised the flag at Iwo Jima.
A beam of pink light saved Christopher Dick's life.
Claude Shannon forged a science of signal,
Roland Barthes a cult of noise.
Words ride the drums from Kumasi to Techiman.

2.
Trust the pictures on the screen.
Build an altar to the projectionist.

3.
Rods and cones and ganglia:
our bodies enigma engines.
I call to say it's storming,
drive safely:

my voice encodes
flies through the air
hits a tower.

I touch you,
tongue to the base of your neck.
You shiver ones and zeroes.

4.
These are Psalms of the Cryptodaemonomicon,
each scribble a divine variable,
fugue made dogma:

You cannot outrun the talking drums.


Bionote

Originally hailing from Winston-Salem, NC, Samuel Smith now lives, works, writes and practices his photography in Denver, CO. He'd love it if poets sold millions of copies of their work and played stadium tours, but since that's not the planet he was born on he labors away in the exciting world of marketing by day and plies his craft in the evenings and on weekends, which never last long enough. His work has appeared in places like The New Virginia Review, Poet & Critic, The Cream City Review, storySouth, Pemmican, Uncanny Valley, Amethyst Arsenic, Manifest West and The Dead Mule. He is the publisher and poetry editor for Scholars & Rogues, an online journal of culture, arts, literature and politics.