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The Poetry Warrior (c) Abigail Beaudelle - 2008.
All Poetry and artwork (c) the respective artists.
Ballad of the Almost: IV
Brian K. Ladd

Syringe fingers
Pricked my youth
Boiling my insides
With their black tar kiss

Since, I’ve heaved
Dichotomy
On every street curb
Relationship

Spouting malformed
Rhetoric through lips
Still ensorcelled by
Your sandpaper breasts

I should thank you.
When you fucked me
You fucked me up.
My difference is my identity

Just as mountains launch
Upward against the pastoral
And seas glaze over the
Distant horizons

I am bigger than you.
My theology is existence
My bible is Fowles
All of my heroes are broken

Memories of those weekends
The silver augury of your design
In the triangle butcher blade
The geometry of your descent

I hugged mother arm chair
Ate dust-bunnies fur and all
Picked my way through jungles
Of RCA cables and speaker wire


To find my voice
Tenderness too
Felt it in the gentle stroke
Of Erato

The wide swirl tongue of
Calliope
And the hard grip hand-job
Of Melpomene

Bled ink from an
Open wound
Worked material
Always working material

Like A spidery textile worker
In an empty mill
Trying to meet deadline
Or as

A metaphor carefully
Chosen to
Obscure or enlighten
My true feeling

Something universal
Something personal
Something indigenous
To humanity

To wit
The genesis of me
Was wrought
Between your thighs.
"Brian K. Ladd was born in the shadow of an ancient monadnock, nursed on the milk of
storytellers, and left to play in the midst of myths and legends. He has since tried to bring the
dual world of myth and reality together. He amalgamates philosophy, literature, and a voyeuristic
honesty for our common culture that gives his stories and poems a poignancy that is an
immediate indictment, and a nostalgic reverie."