By Salvatore Buttaci on Tuesday, 24 April 2012
Category: Poetry

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reading Ezra Pound's unpublished 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 

http://tinyurl.com/7ssnzg4

He lives with his wife Sharon in West Virginia.  

 

 

 

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