Bill Freind


prefab nostalgia

Who pays for the feigned plunge?
And the news of closures – gosh! 
The attendance of hats is why ceremonies 
are the lowest form of theater.
Always ending, or never – either way.
Cicada buzz in the stifle,
the raising of lawns.
Hum it, but it’s not your song.
Who kicked my glue pail? 
When I get home 
I'm buying a monitor. 

 

Chance of Showers

Regrets of the eternal 
yard sale.
Were the embers really options?
A sheen
from the fabulist of the veld, 
throat full of sprouts,
but I’m paraphrasing here.
A dream of dustlessness.
Yesterday, drain pipes and fake meat,
today something, let’s call it a tern, 
scrawls above the bocce match.
Lawn sports!
Ground poultry for all!
Solutions, elsewhere.

 

Small Town Poem

Inside the house
a painting of the house.
Town map, spotlit
second story. Okay 
and okay. We know 
those who would commandeer, 
their gluing. Affable Saxons 
hang doortags. What’s dropped, 
left to rot on sills. A debt 
settled in wet bills. One drags 
the flotsam, denies 
the bric-a-brac. Spare grackles 
demanding letters. Puzzled juncos 
fake receipts. Late summer
in this burg of lagging clocks.
It remains, headless and unblank.
Now the laundry fails, the seeds 
nearly apt. These will not be pieces.

Bill Freind is the author of two collections of poetry: American Field Couches (BlazeVox, 2008) and An Anthology (housepress, 2000), as well as the editor of Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums: Essays on the Poetry of Araki Yasusada (Shearsman, 2012).

 
 

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