Darren King, Poet

	Darren King King is a writer of essays, assays and poems who first explored writing at the encouragement of his 10th Grade English Literature teacher. He supports his writing with a career in the automotive industry where seemingly everyone is from somewhere else (i.e., other than the Motor City).Mr. King resides in a small town in his home state of Michigan withhis wife and their two children.

The Science of Comfort


Looking-
For female volunteers
To participate
In a comfort survey.

The participant sits,
Comparing comfort
And firmness attributes
Using Pairwise Methodology.

Subjective results are generated
For comparison to static force
Measurements made here in our lab.
Anyone interested?


About this found poem: the poem was sent to me from a colleague, a chemist in the automotive industry; it's an example of how people communicate with varying styles of language - here, the style is technical, methodical, stoic - ironically, a scientific approach to something so subjectiveand personal as individual-perceived comfort.

A Dental Digression


I can’t pronounce feckless
now my top front teeth are gone,
at least not clearly. I practice in the mirror—

the best I do is ekleth while I think of people
who suffered much for love,
and want to count myself among them.

Instead I suffered gum-disease
and habits I’d rather not go into.

For three years I wore braces
that cost my father plenty, a silver fence
across my mouth—though it never stopped me talking,
as my father often noted—but I should be grateful
for the profile he afforded.

I cut his life-support last week,
clicked him out like one of those light-bulbs
he was always railing to turn off:
thousands for a winning smile
but not an extra penny to Con Ed.

He was a Navy fighter pilot, and he thought me feckless.
I once asked him what happened to the dead.
They rot, he said.


Two days ago we burned him, as directed,
planted his ashes next to a bunch of dead people
who had a lot more money than he ever did—

just a poor bastard rubbing elbows
with the rich, as he once described himself.

I don’t know if he suffered much for love,
but I suspect he did. That might be why
I never told him about my teeth.
It would have killed him.

Eschatology at 4 A.M.

Comes the low-gear grind
of the long-pronged garbage truck
to offer up my weekly slough
in bloated plastic bags that break
like Beelzebubs pičatas, disgorging bottles,
last year’s shoes, old New Yorker magazines,

raucous scraps of gutted wants
crushed into a mass of Caesar’s castoff stuff,
hauled out to a landfill, bulldozed down a chasm.

With what angels looking on?

men in overalls, buzzards overhead,
the risen sun, and—the tongue stumbles on the word—
beauty, stripped-down beauty,
the world awake, remade.

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Other Poems by Darren King

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