Second Nature, Third Eye, Fifth Wheel

By John Michael Flynn

This collection, rife with wordplay and often charactized by a lighter touch, addresses love, fidelity, faith , amorality and the need for family ties, anchored in what Seamus Heaney once described as poetry's need for a "sense of moving on, crossing something...into the dark...into the unkown...towards a destination and a transition."   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Basil Rosa
• Release date: Apr 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215076163

John Michael Flynn

John Michael Flynn also writes novels as Basil Rosa. He's published three collections of short stories, one with Publerati, and another with Fomite, and a book of essays with New Meridian Arts. He's taught at schools, colleges and university in the United States, Moldova, Turkey and Russia. To quote the poet Forrest Gander, "his poems are not absurdly modern but take the risk of articulating a serious moral gaze." 

Book preview

Love Is A Ballad, A Quartet

Eternals beheld his vast forests

Age on ages he lay, clos’d, unknown.

William Blake

1.

Cut and paste here your fang

scars as I spin tales

about forgiveness defining

sanctimonious responsibilities.

You have me sawed-off, out of it

chewing soul because I can’t find magic

during each planned rendezvous

with a naked midnight.

Addled in the rinse of moonlight

I turn now to silver melting over grass

a town common, memories of legs

in your smile, each heroically elegiac.

2.

You coaxed me forward

into the undertow, our past.

Take them now these hard, coiling voices

set them free as angelic waves

so I’ll know again downward spirals

each fathom that once held us together.

I cannot stand myself any longer

recalling acts of violence I submitted to

and in response how I inflicted pain

to broker repentance.

Here on this beach remains of us wash up

shaped like a series of elasticized hooks

tied to ropes eroding in the shadows

a storm having thrashed our bones.

Witness me negotiating infinity’s edge

and please trust I won’t ever forget.

3.

While showing peach trees how to tremble in the rain

I follow urges to shape shawls of jackal light left neglected.

Patrolling truant impulses, I season my nights with blood petals.

If only I’d been more – I can’t imagine living now

without this hunger for you, for a common language.

What I accept is that beauty remains a sublime intelligence.

4.

Pawning the chipped hands of God Fortune

quoting ourselves as portrayed in a Netflix doc

about American ignorance we sing,

If it’s not one springtime, it’s your mother.

Inscrutable restorations. Perishable resolve.

Caviling degrees of incivility.

We watch tomorrow arrive

in the guise of dystopian genius.

Tension among ghosts, a lower-case epiphany

along avenues where garmentos fabricate

responses to our hand-blown glass threads.

A holding on? If so, how to respond?

Our fingers become a loom stitching

interstices into elegance.

We’re oafish in response.

The runs, the turns, the compensations.

Responsorial Speech

My fellow arachnids , sycophants

indefatigable power rangers in limbo

with your identity calls and action ballads

learning jigs granny forgot to teach,

so many September constellations

have arrived which I couldn’t hang myself

or my reasons for failure on.

Like you, I get stuck in the traffic sometimes,

but I’m not like that guy over there.

That guy, man, he’s a sod farm.

He’s seditious