Poem by Bill Barnum

"Lunch Time" by James Conant

Dinner of Saints

Flagrant morals scattered without churches
Rehearse their droppings over stuttered grass
That loves to spit its tireless teeth
Into a sea of change

Enrico Caruso fractures silence with luster
Thunder roles diamonds dandles daisies
Shatters window glass carpet
Where bare feet shall dance

Gitchi Manatu mighty in lightening
Spatters Ato's hermaphrodite brains
On forty seventh street’s whore parlor pants

Glad rags bongo black shoes shining
Tap tall temple’s holy text
Till bare truth alters night

Promotion flowers a bird’s beak
On Fifth Avenue heels tap into sewers
As princess weight gains fame in a Spanish corner

Adobe walls love, laughter’s look
Shatters the vain swain’s gilt mirror
Pasted jewels jangle and light
Wasted eyes sink their caves ardor

Virgin vessels now held
Will fall into an alley’s ash bound rain
Eagle wing seen from puddles
Turn descending feet through cautious blue

Small girl with glassless rims stares
From boy-eyed dream
At dead city’s mute brain

Struck steel strings
Shake long tunnels ‘round doom-less
Trains forever through drunken augurs
Of tomorrow’s past
Only candle flame at last
Presaging life’s vast formless loom

Prince’s ornate tigers sell
A stream of fashions from decayed diamonds
Reek of ancestors unnamed feet
Pour their violence on a village where
Hands fasten ribbons in the hair of silence

Lachrymose desires dream days
Within the earth’s hotel where altered brains
Are spilled on silver-plated stars
Hindu turbans stride an English night
Through New York steel

Facile dyes are wished to stain
Old bosoms with the pain of love
And grass that’s dark enough to hope for hips
To grind our footless dalliance into death
The mother of lost time where youth-filled eyes
Repose in aging bones and mouths
Without their teeth will swallow crime

Plasmatory spasm on macadam a stranger
Seeking danger stepped on moonlight
Fallen on the tides economic waves
Over brink of a swan’s peccadillo
Swim to a tune where tin gods dance
A thorn in flesh where dawn’s thin dress
Invites early coalition of farms
Intellectual gardens are ambiguities

Pejorative largess relieves destitution
Old institutions enslave elevators
Of commerce treading on eggs we rape
Minnesota and ravage Chicago income
In Connecticut is a mendicant’s pasture

A fit of conservatism recedes
To a war of roses
The king has cut his throat!

Atmosphere in the stratosphere
Serves client with luncheon
Locates an inconvenient middle age
Mastery of the sun at noonday
Masters life

Married but attracted to another
The keeper of the Temple of Apollo
Must be above suspicion
Derision from the Prefect of Police
Signs sun to the moon’s miser

A shot in the locker
Sharpened pencils
At a dinner of saints