Two poems by Kurt Klopmeier
Sandman
Every night some man
he’s never seen adds
a little sand to each sack tied to him
and sneaks out before first light.
He swings his feet over the bedrails
and two bags fall to floor to pull
him upright. He crosses the room,
as they drag him back towards bed.
Bags dangle from his wrists,
slump his shoulders and crook
his back, and all around his waist
they swing, a heavy skirt.
A small one, plum-size
hangs from his penis. There was a time
he hoped this might
make it longer
and his body was so light
he had no weight at all.
Leaving the ground
was a thought.
The bags are full to the top now,
and grains collect in the cracks
of his hardwood, grit
between his molars.
They crawl in across his room,
the desert of its distance
and he knows they’ll accrue,
creep up his body, till they cover his eyes
adding one small dune
to the land’s mass.
Grendel, Out an Arm
I’ll be your bête noire, baby: somebody’s gotta,
your fiend to creep up your door in dark,
tussle with in beetle-black,
breathe your boozy breath till dawn.
You force me to feast on your flesh,
gorge on it, its glutton, gobble it
into my greedy gullet, and you, Geat-white,
dense and pulsing, drop me panting
and I beat it back to den by daybreak
banished into my dark dank.
It makes me act a monster, manacled
by hardscrabble hands, so readily released
when you have me wounded, makes me hate
the day, sit on god-cursed haunches til sun sets
and finally night sneaks in, moon glinting
off your sweat-sheened back,
the only light for miles.
Kurt Klopmeier is a writer and teacher living in Boston, MA. He has had poems published in journals such as ripple(s), Amethyst Arsenic, and Consequence.
Hi Kurt,
These poems have done their job well: they disturb me. The imagery stuns me and fills me the sensory impact of the feelings of anger, loss, disgust, fear…Grendel is a humanitarian view of this monster and an explanation for the circumstances under which all of us could become the same. In this way, as disturbing as these poems are, they are also hopeful, for in understanding comes compassion, and through compassion comes love, and from love comes healing…