A YELLOW DOOMSDAY DRESS
 

BEACHED WAIL

RAT CITY

THE OBOE ROOM

short bio
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

RAT CITY

The streets are the subject
in a hanging mural of fog...

Tossed coin-scratched,
dollar-a-hope tickets and
cigarette butts litter a bus stop in
southwest Seattle.
Day laborers and I
sit on knocked-over shopping carts
and wait.
Pigeons cringe as they gobble crumbs.
Bums are hungry, but
not hungry enough
to bag these feathered free lunches.

A sixteen-year-old school girl
wearing a mask of rouge-evil
walks by my
my-oh-my eyes
as the soaked grey air melts her blue
mascara. It runs thick
into my rump-romp thoughts.

The sun Tom-peeps through
the broken pane of a cloud...

A yellow Camaro,
with black and tweetered interior
beams the happy Big Band sound
that spiked the punch of music
long before
Cobain's grunge and angst
hardened the rain that
loves this emerald city.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Old bald crabber; your pots plugged
with thistle and grass, stacked ten
high behind seaward listing shed,
will miss back-deck, hold and season
while you rig houses for birds, splice wire
for TVs and toasters. Your dry-rot
thinned spirit crumbles slow, a sorry
beach and reef away from fifty-fathomed
dungeness grounds, wind-curled, chopped;
jostling jellyfish and slob cursing blockmen.

Claw-cracked clams, dead or dying
in cull-crate lashed to rail, hold more
meat than your creaking dreams
and dry-docked days.
 
 

c Dan Tompsett

top of page
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

From Seattle.  I have been interested in writing since I was 
8 or 9 years old.  I have been becoming more serious about 
writing in just the last month or so.  My formal education is 
very sparse. I virtually quit going to school after the 9th 
grade. I got a GED diploma when I was 17.

My taste in poetry is rather eclectic. I like Charles Bukowski, 
ee Cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pablo Neruda, Allan 
Ginsberg, Yeats, Carl Sanburg, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, 
etc. etc.

email

to Moongate