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Art Poetry Prose Photos Books&... Links Archives About Home

Regulator & Beast

The Regulator makes you
sit up straight
& appear decent,
while the Beast,
weaned on Dada,
wants you to slouch
at his leisure.

The Regulator's
satin red vest
trembles
behind each brass button.

While the Beast
dissipates like smoke
beneath erotic lamplight.

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Late Night

The astronomer's breath
produces clouds of steam
beneath a leafless black maple.

Along the dark boulevard
waves of humanity
like dusty oxygen
rising from abandoned graves
crashes against the horizon
splintering the split-rail fence's
muscular shoulders.

A black streetlamp
on this cold night
wears handcuffs
of pure nickel.

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Romantic Liver

The problem with desire for oblivion,
that Romantic liver,
is that it avoids the mercurial
sense of touch,
three drops of lime
across a waist.

I love the men & women
who dove
into arteries of language
& who emerged
(or never emerged)
from their inky wells,
from their particular cultivations
of despair.

But I love the resin
in the pine cone more
than I love words
splashed like palm fronds
across the red terracotta roof tiles
of my childhood.

We could, of course,
eliminate all visceral verbs
from the vocabulary
of hedonism.

But that's like outlawing
Swiss chocolates,
& who wants to do
that?

So, Romantic liver
is here to stay.

Aleixandre & Shelley
sail Ariel
across a sea of books
on my Scandinavian shelf,
as pale light
through late afternoon Venetian blinds
tattoos a herd of zebra
across the dusky waists
of Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson.

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Alan Britt's recent books are Vegetable Love (2009), Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). The Poetry Library (www.poetrymagazines.org.uk) providing a free access digital library of 20th & 21st century English poetry magazines with the aim of preserving them for the future has included Britt's work published in Fire (UK) in their project. Britt's work also appears in the new anthologies, American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, 2009 and Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), a bi-lingual anthology of Latin American and North American poets, Hofstra University Press/Fondo de Cultura Económica de Mexico/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru, 2008. Britt recently served as Panel Chair for Poetry Studies & Creative Poetry for the PCA/ACA Conference 2007 in Boston and read poetry at Ramapo College in Mahwah, NJ (2009) and the WPA Gallery/Ward-Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, NY (2008). Nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2008. Alan currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University and lives in Reisterstown, Maryland with his wife, daughter, two Bouviers des Flandres, one Bichon Frise and two formerly feral cats.