POETRY BY BRYAN RUST
Fear and Trembling
Fear and Trembling is my first poetry collection from 1993. It has already sold out two printings, but is now available for the first time in over five years. Below is a sample from this volume.
The Big Lie (The Broad Sword)
I told a big lie.
A big, huge lie.
A whopper,
a real beauty.
I repeated it so often
that I could tell it with my eyes closed
and my shoelaces tied together.
However,
I discovered a basic problem
with this wondrous fabrication.
Everyone believed it.
Old friends,
total strangers,
talk show hosts;
it seems that I had
abused the privilege
of owning an honest face.
So now,
night after night,
in front of large numbers
of paying spectators,
I take a sword from its sheath,
lean my head back,
and slide the tempered blade
down my throat.
Even though I claimed to have the knowledge,
I've never learned the trick properly.
I never really stop to consider
how it's supposed to be done.
I just keep thinking
that I'll never hurt myself
as long as I keep turning
lies
into truth
before my very eyes.
c 1993 Bryan Rust
DRY LEAVES AND RADIO WAVES
My second volume of poetry is entitled Dry Leaves and Radio Waves. It is very close to being finished and should be available soon. Below is a sample poem from the collection.
Combover
As you grow older,
all your manners fall out
and your scruples shrivel up.
Your opinions become horned weapons
wielded with dispatch.
Once lofty perspectives
lose bone mass;
the individual shrinks
into a cranky passivity.
Hopes tend toward brittleness
and can snap like fingers
in a good stiff breeze.
Those exhibiting advanced stages
Of socially inappropriate behavior
are rounded up
and sent to compounds
where they are rehabilitated
in time for their own funerals.
As you grow older,
you start to tell a lot of stories:
long wheezing narratives
that you’ll relate
to any flickering lamppost
with one good ear
and a streetcorner to kill.
All our lives we tell stories.
Some are lucid,
precise.
Most of them
are randomfire
dollops of gossip,
scatterbrain shot.
If we’re brave,
we’ll eventually
force out some form of truth,
a lasting digression
of deathbed conscience.
c 2007 Bryan Rust
"rose petals" photo by B.R.
