Oregon poet Chad Reynolds
photo: Chad Reynolds on "When We Two Parted"
Vegan Warning
– on beasts
Don’t give your heart to a vegetarian. They think meat is gross.
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Bellhop For Your Baggage
– on transportation
You begin by holding the handbag
But the luggage multiplies
In your sweaty grasp
Piling upon your shoulders
’til face and knees are sagging
All for the price of shagging,
Degraded from knight to squire
All for dread Desire
But a bell’s hop between
True love and valet
Loaded down with
Purest Samsonite
Unpacking damage
On snake skin scales
A contest of scars
When you could be
Sharing the stars
They carry on
And on and on
Dirty laundry packed away
For ease of burden
Heedless of the things we belong to
Our own faded treasures
Chained to our soul
Cargo of stacked satchels
In a lake of Merlot
Trunks within trunks
Faces in valises
Every love lost
Butchered in my memory
Fine limbs folded
In Louis Vitton
Chunks shopped from the past
Packed for posterity
Patched with everywhere you’ve been
The place where you drag it all out
And put it away
Is the place you call Home
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Panning For Gloss
-on lipstick
Fantasy becomes history
Scripting out the history
Technicolor tapestries
Factory made beauty’s mastery
The surface is the max factor
The only honest man an actor
Celluloid mask on our memories
Liquid glass within all mammaries
Mundane superficialities
Dominate our realities
13 channels of shit on the TV
Commercial breaks won’t set us free
Seeking true connections
With electric reflections
We fuck and fight and die
Before a cold glass eye
As absent as the god that made us
Plastic ideals degrade us
No brave new world arises
Another coat of shit on the same old crisis
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Author Biography
Chad Reynolds is a cornfed madman with a heart of gold. Born in Kansas and bred in Las Vegas, he currently lives in Salem, Oregon with his cat Lazarus. He has been writing and performing poetry since 1985. Chad is a member of the Unshod Quills Writers Collective.