Robbie Gamble

Shout

Inside my head dwells another lumpen head
looming and featureless save for his shout
relentless as a neighbor’s chained Rottie.

He shouts in the shower, at the keyboard,
on public transit, in that predawn passageway
I spelunk between sleep and second sleep.

Oh, that he was serene and patinaed
like the bronze Buddha that awed us in Todai-ji
hovering full fifty feet over the pressed temple crowds.

No, he is plastic and coarse
the color of pus
and his shouts rasp a rhetoric beyond language

reverberating the pain of multitudes
in famine or exile or humiliation
populating the dusty berms of the unimaginable.

I have spent a lifetime trying to muffle him
with gestures and Right Words.
Just listen to him tear through my lacy naiveté.

In this world now, a strawberry is a luxury.
So is universal healthcare, and especially
the fingers of blue sky between towering thunderheads.

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of the chapbook A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Slipstream, Indianapolis Review, Post Road, Salamander, and The Sun. He divides his time between Boston and an apple orchard in Vermont.

Banner Art:
Volcano at Night, Jules Tavernier, ca.1880s, Wikimedia Commons

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