Kevin Brown

            author of Exit Lines and Abecedarium

about Kevin news and events Exit Lines
 poems contact blog
 home





Sample Poems:

Diagramming Won’t Help This Situation

Grammatical rules have always baffled
me, leaving me wondering whether my
life is transitive or intransitive, if I am the
subject or object of my life, and no one
has been able to provide words to describe
my actions, even if they do end in -ly.

But now the problem seems to be with
pronouns:  I am unwilling to be him,
and you are unable to be her, so we
will never be them--the ones talking
about what they need from the grocery

store because the Rogers are coming for
dinner tonight; the couple saving for a
vacation, perhaps a cruise to Alaska or a
museum tour of Europe; the two who meet
with a financial advisor to plan their children’s

college fund while still managing to set enough
aside for their retirement--and so we will
continue to be nothing more than sentence
fragments, perfectly fine for effect,
but forever looking for the missing

part of speech we can never seem to find.

The Church of Divine Reality, Inc.

There are laws, you know, legal
liabilities that must be
considered.  If Jesus shows up
in a vision, and somebody

veers off the interstate into a
telephone pole, who do you
think they’re going to sue?
It’s not going to be Jesus, I

can assure you.  Or take the
case from a few years ago:
a man rids himself of all
his worldly possessions (well,

except for a camel’s hair coat)
and goes all paparazzi on
people, getting in their faces
and screaming about repentance.

Lost his head, he did.  And
who did the family go after?
It wasn’t the Spirit, as if he or
she or whatever has any type

of representation; he or, you
know, barely has any kind
of manifestation these days.
You see, someone around here

has to store up treasures
and make sure they’re protected
from every bit of rust, moth, or
ne’er-do-well who has the Virgin

Mother show up on a burrito.
Someone has to take responsibility
for God, after all; it’s not like
we want him running wild.

Exit Lines

I was always out of character,
it seems.  While I thought I
could run to you, I stumbled
over missed cues, unspoken

lines, and a background that
never fit our daily drama.  At
least actors can count on a
curtain call when the curtain

falls, but I must skulk away to
the shadows as the audience
exits as silently as you did
when you left last night.

Alternative History

If Hitler would have become an artist,

and

Einstein had worked as a watchmaker,

would we not have found ways to

pound enemies into submission
with paintings

and

to wage war
by winding our watches,

always making sure the
trains arrived on time?



Sample Poems:

Exordium
n. -- introduction
 
We do not mourn when words pass
away, hold no funerals for phrases that leave
the lexicon, not realizing that the loss of
petrichor and psithurism leave us
 
with no way to convey the smell of grass
after a rain or the whispering of leaves moved by
the wind.  As our love affair with
language loses its ardor, we move
to the mediocrity of a marriage
 
of convenience, believing that neologisms
like texting and tweeting, webinar and
wing nut, can convey a meaning beyond the basic
definition, allowing politicians to pervert
words and pander to a populace who see
 
language as a tool used to hammer
a point home, not to unfold it like an
origami swan.  Yet a remnant remains,
those unacknowledged legislators of
 
a land where words do not die, but are
used to chant the way to salvation, for
those who have ears to hear.


Bemissionary
v. -- to annoy with missionaries
 
The man who has attained immortality,
at least thus far, proselytizes about his
creation, which will cleanse one’s colon
 
of impurities, if taken twice daily; three
parts vinegar, four parts prune juice, and a
teaspoon of molasses for taste will resurrect
 
my rectum, saving not my soul, but my
intestines.  The man on television with
the high-gloss hair and smile against the
 
black-matte suit tells me that I can have my
best life now, if only I will purchase a
juicy fruit juicer or glue-be-gone or a
 
concoction of chemicals that cannot be
found on the periodic table, yet will
remove scratches (and dings!) from my
 
car door.  However, I prefer a life without
perfection, like the crack in the cup that came
when I saw God in the backyard, a baby bird falling
 
from the nest, then flying as if it did so
every day, the smell of warming cinnamon
tea filling the cool kitchen
 
when the sound of ceramic on linoleum
tile brings me back
from the brink of ecstasy,
 
or even the expired,
pulp-laden orange juice that I drink
at the office, must force down
on days I have forgotten breakfast,
 
in the same way I swallow the spirit,
which works like the scratch remover:
imperfectly and without reason.


Heterophemize
v. -- to say something different from what you mean to say
 
You are my noun,
I set out to say,
my person, place,
and thing, but I verbed
 
instead, stammered
out adjective
after adjective, but spoke
so adverbly you
 
exclamated.  I thought
we were gerunding
well, but you saw nothing
but a split infinitive,
separating to from be
 
together, misplaced
modifiers left us,
nothing.
 
A fragment.
 
Syntax and semantics stumped
me, failed to notice the lack
of a coordinating
 
conjunction, always more
of a math person, where variables
are solved for, able
to understand what x equals
 
and y,
 
where one
plus one
always equals two.