THREE POEMS by Salvatore Buttaci
You can't see it, but there's a silencer at the end of her pistol.
Does Your Gun Need a Silencer If You Plan to Kill a Mime?
who can hear in the forest
who cares if the tree falls there
on the city concrete
the mime bobbing
like a stringless marionette
acts out a wordless life
heart beating without sound
hands and face dotted
with huge painted eyes
that roll back white
slow as death a slash of mouth
lip-synchs the unsaid but
who can read the mime
rail against the mugger’s gun
when fired
could unload little hot steel pellets
that tear flesh and bone
but a gun poked against a mime
mimics a magician's trick:
suddenly from the fired gun
a fluttering flag unfolds
a red BANG
bold enough to bring the mime
to his padded knees.
#
© 1994 Salvatore Buttaci
False Arrest
Underneath baggy old tatters
the beggar's heart
lilts to the mandolin notes
he strums.
In the process
a policeman who can quote
ordinances such as vagrancy
and disturbing the peace
as readily as the beggar
can strum Italian ballads
seizes the mandolin.
"You're making a big mistake!"
cries the beggar.
"That mandolin is all I own.
It's the only peace I know."
#
© 1990 Salvatore Buttaci
A Short Poem
To a poetry editor
I submitted an untitled short poem
consisting of one word: "Us"
which she rejected
so I revised it to
"You and I forever"
which she rejected
asking for length, for substance.
So I revised it to
"You and I forever
reading Ezra Pound's unpublished
adolescent verse unearthed
by a Neapolitan psychic
beneath the ruins of the original
Mamma Leone's Ristorante
in the old quarter of Naples,
which he sold for a carton of
Lucky Strikes cigarettes,
which I bought by the pound:
heavy, tedious, ego-centric--
Reading material for
Us
on humdrum afternoons
though the fact remains:
nothing's changed.
It will always be
Us
You and I
forever
A poem need only be as long as breath:
brevity is not a crime
like Pound's long-winded
cantoed rhymes,
and poems are not for burying.
Did I mention my revision
Was rejected?
#
© 1991 Salvatore Buttaci
By Salvatore Buttaci:
Flashing My Shorts and 200 Shorts, published by All Things That Matter Press, are available in book and Kindle editions at http://www.kindlegraph.com/authors/sambpoet
His two chapbooks: Boy on a Swing…(Big Table Publisdhing) http://tinyurl.com/6qmkdy4
And What I Learned from the Spaniard (Middle Island Press) …http://tinyurl.com/7apsk6s
His new book, If Roosters Don’t Crow, It Is Still Morning: Haiku and Other Poems (Cyber-Wit Publications) is available at
He lives with his wife Sharon in West Virginia.
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