Poetry By Ryan Quinn Flanagan : Canada's emerging young poet

Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Spartan Exposures

How I have come to live like a man
impassioned by the weight of days,
that unrelenting sneer of stamped nourishment;
no simple monument am I, no visionless chortle
of hectic prig, but rather such forceful pinwheels of
gliding sensations, such formidable failures  
so as to wrinkle shirt and eye and mind –
Listen! -- rangy blooded boy downwind and hilt-drawn,
the bosomed young come through Spartan exposures,
that I should hurl loaded ships against the filthy rocks
and listen for screams from the cretin abyss
once more.

Whistle Walls
 
Whistling walls – a neighbouring shower always does this,
the corroded rattle of old pipes first, followed by a whistle.
This is what it's like to live on top of one another – a knavery of humanity!
Fox-skulkers in dark halls, seen only through the peep hole.
Geyser throats cleared from drooping couches of torpor. 
The unfixed and unhinged brutishly mauling one another.
 
The superintendent five winters gone,
no use bothering the dead.
So it is, that I find myself among the stiff and emulous.
Gorging on the pufferfish dream.
Knit wool socks folded in on one another, 
with a personal origami.
 
But first, the great weight of the spackle-sequestered:
these beds of saints,
these well-crumbed greasy perjures
that sing of the pauper's lime.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author who lives in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work has been published both in print and online in such places as: The New York Quarterly, Red Fez, European Poetry, Evergreen Review, Himalaya Diary, Setu, GloMag, and The Oklahoma Review.  He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.