swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

in each action
John Greiner

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Mechanisms

Inconsequential Empire State Building of this afternoon
I’d trade you for an excerpt from the press release
on the creep’s fairytale;
he’s a screamer in the shower of scalding water and repentents
with an imagination so rarely seen in these precocious times.
I know that my watch will never keep the time correctly,
there’s too much concrete in the mechanisms.

Newsstand of the Paperboy Slaughtered

Diamond eyed queens with Victoria conceits
claw their way into the Albert Hall
while we in America mention murder
in each action
and act on that motion
with a grave childhood smile.
I shudder for youth.
Killers without the least bit of compassion
run the rhymes of the schoolyard of horror lines
on the newsstand of the paperboy slaughtered.
They have a lot to say,
but I don’t need it in my downtown of deceit
with no uptown where I can sail to.

Dodge

Dodge the lucky lady’s line
and the lad will come up crying
with a suitcase in his hand.
There are traveling beggars
and Pablo Picasso look alikes
who stake out new worlds
in plague times
and end up building castles
of Spanish conceits
in the outer boroughs of New York.
You couldn’t get me up to the Bronx
to see Don Quixote.
I’m not that daring
with my masturbatory fantasies,
even if I’m more primally brutal.
My adventures are the stuff
of pawn shops and porno palaces
soon to be extinct
in a world of kids with grand plans
to ground the wondrous down.

Tomorrow, Today, Yesterday

Tomorrow we’ll be shot out of the heavens
with hotel room screams of lurid nights
(we commit to so many horrible jobs
in this city of shattering lives).
Today we’ll watch the television suck sky blue
from the bottom of the ocean
and clap with the canaries in the West Virginia
imagination at the applause sign.
There’s always yesterday to prattle on about
with its menus offering meat boiled or broiled.

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John Greiner is a poet, playwright, short fiction writer and visual artist who lives in New York City. Greiner’s collections of poetry include In An Attic Palace Beneath a Slaughtered Sky (Arteidolia Press, 2022), Circuit (Whiskey City Press, 2020), Turnstile Burlesque (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2017), The Laundrymen (Wandering Head Press, 2016), Bodega Roses (Good Cop/Bad Cop Press, 2014), Modulation Age (Wandering Head Press, 2012), Shooting Side Glances (ISMs Press, 2011) and Relics From a Hell’s Kitchen Pawn Shop (Ronin Press, 2010). Greiner’s plays have been produced in New York City, Chicago and Gloucester, Massachusetts. His work in décollage is a motion towards a more transcendent poetic language and his collaborative pieces with photographer Carrie Crow has been shown in galleries, museums and public spaces in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Venice, Hamburg and Berlin.

In An Attic Palace Beneath a Slaughtered Sky on Arteidolia Press, 2022 →