History on the Heads of Matches
Poor, To Use a Vulgar Expression
Our Love Goes Round and Round
History on the Heads of Matches
Message written in charcoal and afloat in a bottle’s throat
Knowledge soaked in rum and ignited for insurance
Laws shrunk onto dagger blades for a game of five-finger
Loophole cheat-sheet on a nail gambled and lost
News clipped from papers and glued to a ransom note
Ticket printed with yesterday’s date and winners
Scripture scribbled on a deposit slip and slid to the teller
Scrip to dynamite the vault when money proved illegible
Map to stolen gold locked in a strongbox full of bullion
Signs for waypoints sunk with a grapeshot leak
History who fled through marshland and hid with a hollow reed
Story sentence run on to throw bloodhounds off the scent
The end in a willow thicket hunters wouldn’t enter
Note: I stole the title from “Secession” by Jake Adam York
Poor, To Use a Vulgar Expression
Poverty is not a genetic trait but a lifestyle choice
Not about slavery but states’ rights and taxation
Not a crime of desire but of power and control
Poverty is ten times likelier at home than in the workplace
The leading cause of schoolyard insult rhymes worldwide
A top concern in households earning over $100,000
A more tasteful term for poverty might be collateral damage
Revenue adjustment on the highway to economic hope
Society’s last penny put down on the railroad track
Coins dropped off skyscrapers fall fast enough to kill poverty
Coins stacked high as skyscrapers could pay for poverty
All coins in the United States contain traces of poverty
The next coin flip is due to come up prosperity
Note: I stole the title from An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus
Our love forever elevates
Blood alcohol. Our love dispenses
Mints but can’t pass a breathalyzer
With said advice. Our sign says Open
Heart Surgery, our barfly Close
Your eyes please. If a rubber stopper
Spouts off about the shit we missed
In last night’s mist, our evidence
Hidden behind the basement furnace
Ferments. Our fire awaits a house
Or fight, our hour a glass, our down
And out a pour. When can this bottle
Spin our love around again?
Note: I stole the title from “Little Fugue of Love and Death” by Richard Newman
Steven D. Schroeder’s first book of poems is Torched Verse Ends (BlazeVOX [books]). His poetry is available or forthcoming from New England Review, Pleiades, The Journal, The Collagist, and Verse Daily. He also edits the online poetry journal Anti-, serves as a contributing editor for River Styx, and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer.
