Renoir Gaither

Toledo, OH

Male

About

Welcome to my page. And a special thank you to all artists for staying true to your soul. Live to create. Create to live. You move the world forward with your words, images and songs. Peace.

Blog - see all 13

New Expressions Jun 23

I want to see Tillman's lounge in NYC. Crossing my fingers that I do so.

Poetry

Y2K

Of course, there were signs--
sanitation workers chirped
about some reet poem scrawled
on our trashcan, sap from wild,
two-fisted narcocorridos drifted
in from larcenous windowpanes,
static electricity cracked
its knuckles
like an addict.

With panache of Charlie Chaplin
twitching among hamstrung gears
my wife nested batteries, kitchen
matches, spring taut clocks.
Assured that levity of one
millennium could not possibly
seep into the next.
"If the car doesn't start
in the morning, replace
starter switch," she honked.
"Find a bottle of WD40 under the sink."

There was still the matter
of Hiroshima's platelets,
Soweto's and Guernica's dna tests,
Ken Patchen's bearded ladies,
Robert Johnson's hellhounds.
"There's still the emptying.
Old thermos bottles. Cold stars.
Slums," I spilled.

So I jotted notes--

Life's provisionary:
leave shoes untied.
Listen to Rachmaninov's suite
for two pianos.
There's still time
to become an anarchist!

--and bet a box of animal
crackers that tomorrow
would breed like any other.
Moon, all carbs, no protein.

Television pinched hours through
an eye dropper.
Snow speared, scrabbled, sputtered.
A clipper born against the palisade
of a swallowtail's wings some autumn
past. The edge of yesterday sauntered
out, questionless, while
someone on the other side
of the earth awakened,
page of her book opened
to a mud stain, keys left
forgotten all night in the door.

Molars

Imagine the alpha dog of kitsch nestled above a prim, cucumber lawn. That crackling neon Ajax of a molar marooned outside the dentist's office where, upon entering, you witness the Cliff Note-doting assistant, eyes flitting like a museum guide within spitting distance of a kindergarten class. She cajoles you to endure wheezing vinyl and feisty aquarium fish before the dentist napkins you with family snapshots dry-docked among tony bistros and meandering serif glyphs. The dentist probes, scratches, nudges. Like a midge fly. And suddenly, teeth forget they're teeth. They recall odd facts such as Brutus's wife swallowing hot coals. Or that some wily craftsman used 28,000 teeth to build a spire in China. They remind you that there's an elegance to the story of a manic-depressive farmer who in a frisson of ecstasy tells his wife that he'd become the slope of a knuckleball thrown three decades ago into the soft voice of a woods lit only by the bladder of a saturnine, purple moon. They souse the fact that the inertia of the past rides herd over the heart. One avalanching moment to the next. And you believe them as you do a pot of black-eyed peas or Van Gogh's peasants singing contentedly under twilight's milky propellers. As you know that desire abducts the dreamer.