untitled
Something about a properly executed
Hand to hand that’s a thing of beauty
Different than Keats in delivery
But the end results are kissing cousins
That pass into nothingness
Hilly, proud, welcoming,
this city of fountains
is marked by a spectacular white
wave-shaped concert hall
poured onto the landscape,
a large spaceship waiting for us
outside the Convention Center.
Kansas City Grass Roots Networkers
support refugees
by counter-protesting the Islamophobes.
Police officers on horseback
keep order at Washington Square Park.
Nearby the 217-foot World War I Memorial
cradles a Flame of Inspiration.
In the Memorial’s shadow stands Union Station.
A flock of pigeons circles over waiting Amrack trains
in the second largest railroad station in the country.
An engineer climbs the side of the locomotive.
The pigeon is a determined creature, regardless
of the challenges thrown in its path.
Facing strong into the wind,
Bearing empty denial days,
Marching through dung, disaster, death.
Smiling thru when spit flies backward.
Swinging past the biting asp
Joining the centuries of matched kin.
The answer is always no, wait, suffer
In silence, it will all pass someday
After you have long ceased to care.
Where is the sin in wanting redemption
Today before I wrinkle, fade and limp?
The pawn broker’s clock is lifetime slow.
K. Bruce Florence
smoke a joint
in the joint
joint replacement
joint custody
neighborhood joint
pizza joint
burger joint
nose out of joint
joint venture
joint leverage
joint together in holy megalomony
Quietly
Celebrate
One
Shocked
Day
Through
ALL
This
Changing
Time
Lexington
Remains
First
Somehow
Staying
Round
Not
Orange
(left next to bushel
of summer lodi apples)
Spotted turkey egg
Discovered under painted ladies
Alas empty promises
Hidden among
Pink geraniums
one vibrating note
in the music of
everything not created
and not destroyed
this body hundreds
of trillions of particles
dancing among fireflies
on summer’s air
still here
A thank you to Melva Sue Priddy for her poem that prompted me to write about “this body”.
It was maybe 20 years ago
A man was found in a cave in England
He’d been there 9 thousand years
But had been preserved by cool dark dryness
Enough to leave some DNA in a molar
A history teacher from a little town
Maybe 11 miles away
Thought it might be fun
To see if anyone nearby
might be related to this man
from 300 generations back
He got Oxford to test 20 people
Whose families he knew had been
Around for “awhile”
There was one match – It was him
But he was 43, an only child and never married
Retrospectively, a tragic story
of the death of a long, long line
9043 futile years of suffering
for nothing
