Shanna Compton

Panic 8 Could Not Be Found

You point your feet in the direction of music
You point your thoughts on the notes, too
& feel a smile spread itself

Everything 
is acting upon you
It's OK

Through the park 
green hill 
after hill until
one is lit along the edge

A branch bearing bulb stars
reaches out for you
buzzing incandescent

The sky arranges itself darkly for good contrast

& here's the shebang
you've walked an hour to find

A jumble of light 
& collapsible armatures
A copse of supersized toys
& a muddling crowd

Your core is rare

Which light
which beat or lyric
has touched you
just enough

Umpteen Barbarians

I'm in the market for a replacement face.
I've spent so many hours
pressed up against the bathroom mirror
that decorative nickel plating 
just seems like the way to go at this point. 

But my grill. 
I'm keeping that. 
Even with you up in it.

Should I replace my helmet
before I eat the street? 
Gonna gun the mufflers singing, each two beats.
My mufflers repeat my stock-kit vocabulary,
so much of it mechanical, 
reeking of leather and grease.

We're revved. We're officially peppy.
But we're daunted by damn magnitude.
It comes down to fucking magnitude 
and nothing more dangerous than a too-weak jerk.
Our failure to protect ourselves with 
shields of advanced polymers and jack boots.

Let's strip this carcass gearless. 
Nobody's fearless. 
Deliver us, crevasse. 
We're hanging here, already in midair.
 

Hospital for the Ear & Neck

Setting & receiving tones
we tune our beating machines

which cluster flocklike
& crow alone

Fiddling our knobs together
distilling notes, patterning after

*

An event in the grass
startles rippling groups into the air

Being moved to declare
we are unmanipulated

A preset metaphor returns
nightly to settle our uppermost
 

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