Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City. He’s the author of several novels, including WINDFALL and The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” Dodds’ screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. His poetry has appeared in more than a hundred publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha. You can find more of his work at thecolindodds.com.

 

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Five Poems by Colin Dodds

Joked then Yoked

The waitress comes
and takes the flowers away.
Then farther away.

But the distance is merely symbolic.
Everything here is here at once and always.
Simultaneity is the rule.
We defy the rule. It defies us.

And so easily, you are
joked then yoked
into the myth of satisfaction.

You pay a man to walk behind you
with a rifle to your back.
Finally, the history machine arrives
and decides what you wanted all along.

Then it pays you
all the money in the world to die,
and makes like it’s funnier
than a drunk snowman.

 

The Growl You Borrow

Small spiritual suicides.
Adding up.
Hear them.
Tired, blind.
Then even more.
Belly to the desk.
Trains won’t move.
Then they will.
The remaining virility.
It is trouble.
But it makes happy.
God begins to growl.
Sirens handle the rest.

 

The Faith of Germs

Where are your friends in the cement now?
The bathroom walls are covered
with germs and doubt.

And the germs of doubt spread.
And spread until doubt breaks them down,
and the whole world is rotten.

Doubt the germs all you want.

They still believe in you.

 

New York Wine

Look to The One Who Kills You,
hiding behind his pitchmen,
who take you by the waist, saying:
I like to play it safe, that’s why I drink Alcohol.

A translucent serpent full of eggs
coils and coils around the scene.

Too much light, too much time,
solve your problems with New York wine,
rings the jingle through the thing.

By the trucks, one man asks another
if he’s ever tried New York wine.
By the trucks, unlike the places
you imagine good things happening,

 

A Better Ending

Something indeed happened to us
among the plywood metropolises
of Chicago and Coney Island.
Something happened to us
at Verdun and at Nuremburg.

And now nothing is safe
from the deep hunger and fear that operates us
and makes us so dull.

So we re-translate the ancient texts
to discover that Oedipus Rex just ended too soon,
before he could make his stirring speech,
his big heist and his courageous comeback.