Lost Tenses

Poetry | Dylan Willoughby
a triptych for Kathryn Maris

Mouth Opening Dream

I look down from THE BRIDGE OF SOUGH

To the RIVER OF THE OPEN MOUTHS

A drunk stream of writhing, mucky fish

Their vulgar maws stretched wide

This is where I have been led to pray

A yellow arrow points to a Bucket on a hook

In the bucket there are seven shekels

I empty the bucket into the river

Where the fish fight to eat the shekels

One shekel remains in the bucket

I put the bucket back on the hook

Wander back to Burning Motel

Still heavy, or heavier, with some sin


On Finding A Book in A Rental House Entitled The World And Its Problems, Students’ Textbook

In a dream I plant its cracked spine

Until a man grows claiming to be wise

Driving me out for some ineffable sin

That I had prized above all effable things.

I wander the land CANNOT BE SPOKEN

Haunted by the sense that I should be haunted

Chased by the blood of the earth without bones.

“Who am I AM that IS or WAS or BURNING

WITHOUT BEING BURNED?” I ask NOT-MUCH-OF-ANYTHING

Who replies with laughter that sounds like my own,

And begins sowing my name in the ground.

Nightmare after Waking Too Early

The triple-barking of our neighbor’s poodle

Leads me to a town called LOST TENSES, NM

Where you can feel the rain but cannot

Feel it fall and where the roads are puddled

With metamorphosed weeping mothers

I want to bawl myself to sleep but fear

Of filling that pothole spurs me on to a grove

Where once a guy named Achelous roved

I wish I could tap my red spangled shoes, escape

But I have no red spangled shoes,

And there is no such thing as escape,

I pull some moly out of the ground 

And chomp on its black root till I reach

A dead electric fence whose DO NOT ENTER

has been tossed aside for

NOW ACCEPTING THE LIVING