"Scales" & "What’s a Martlet Anyway?" by Cole Henry Forster

Scales

Let me wind you up,

my goodness and devotion,

and spin you around

all spice and commotion.

Let us talk of heralds and troubadours

on Park Avenue.

Let us break East with Western fist:

hammer in the nighttime, and in

the morning, drawn evenly but crassly

on the simulacrum of your skin.

Let us cook the boss’ fish in oil,

breaded and fried, epileptic son of the sea:

given to prayer and to mania–

trading scales for breadcrumbs,

not out of conscientiousness,

but because mankind is hungry.

Let us walk slowly

as pallbearers for other poets.

Let us steal their lines,

and pass them off as our own;

spolia but as recycling.

So the urban planners will be happy

and the professors will be happy

and together they might travel as improbable lovers

through the bloody constellation of curses

echoing at city hall.

What’s a Martlet Anyway?

It’s too late for fact-checking

or stomach trouble or body panic. 

The summer Sanhedrin is assembled

on Clark Street, and they’ll decide who is in

and who is out, and which of the commandments

might find itself suddenly applicable

in this brutal exegesis of fashion and lilacs.

I’m bigger than the madness

smaller than the handcuffs,

and given to fits, a preternatural goodness;

my garden Pyrrhic and imperative, from

carrots asleep in their dirty bed,

to shovels heaping loneliness on the

banks of the St. Lawrence.

Cole Henry Forster is a poet living and writing in Montreal, QC. His work has appeared in publications in Canada, and the United States.