Still there are far too many blouses and slacks
even though we reduced them by half
in the first move to the home, and half again
in the next, saving only those that almost fit,
like her skin, laying loose against her bones.
There is so little left. Even her wedding ring
I’ve tucked inside my father’s in my dresser drawer,
her gardening hat on a shelf in my closet.
GLOBAL WARMING
In the last days, when
the rivers have all run dry
and lightening flashes
across a burnt red sky
will there be anyone left to cry
on behalf of all who shared this world
and grew to love it,
when streams of crystal water
still flowed out of the hills and
down from snow capped mountains,
and the sky was a lovely blue?
Your nest empty,
You must have been after them all
For yourself.
It must have seemed so urgent–
A whole season of tasting sweetness
To regurgitate it
For others–
And now all these berries still ripe,
Syrupy on the bush.
Yesterday, I saw two others give up–
Pecking though the net once or twice–
Accepting this was no longer for them, but not
You.
You persisted,
Fighting through the barriers
Until the strings, double-netted,
Strangled you, still open-beaked
As I freed you
And lowered your limp feathers
With a handful of blueberries,
I felt the breeze of a wing-beat–
My own pulsing heart.
All these poems.
By the third day I’m already behind.
I don’t know what I expected. This
is my first Literary Orgy.
I click on lexpomo and enter
a world of mostly bared souls;
drunk on love or anger and
everything in between. A few
clothed in politeness, dipping in a toe
to check the temperature while
others gleefully piss in the pool.
All this naked self-expression and
they keep coming faster than I can
thoughtfully read them: a cornucopia
of quickies. Is it a coincidence that
to these aging eyes lexpomo
sometimes looks like lexporno?
It’s all fun and games til someone
loses an eye for a metaphor.
Whatever other punctuation I need,
I could use a refractory period.
Are you mad, glad or sad?
He would ask.
A question that startled me,
realizing my expressions
his entire universe
to navigate. His world
dependent upon me
for survival. My job
to unfurrow brow,
raise edges of mouth
to the smile I feel
every time I see him.
Gourmet kitchen,
a spacious tent,
why induldge in such
a setup? Opt for one of
those sleeping bags
that won’t cause you
to miss the sunrise
in the morning.
Sometimes,
on the rare occasion
when a volcano erupts,
the ashes settle,
and harden to stone,
fluttering down from thick, heavy clouds,
resting on the destruction
the glowing, rolling magma left in its wake.
In Pompeii,
they settled on the corpses
of a thousand Grecians
and wrapped them in a mortician’s cocoon.
Instead of formaldehyde,
they were filled
with sulfur.
Here,
the ashes I created
have landed on you.
The thunder you heard
was my mind collapsing in on itself
and then exploding
in a rush of heat
and hatred.
I lay dormant for a century,
two,
three,
ten,
until the crust
encasing my violent heart
crumbled
like a cheap paint job
on a beat-up old Chevy.
I destroyed everything in my path.
My fire incinerated your body,
my reckless inferno marred you.
Every inch I crawled,
I was fueled
by the combustibles
that caved under my weight
and self-loathing
until all that was left
was the pile of ash
that buried
and smothered you.
Ladies in green polka dotted dresses
springing with frowns of failure.
Little boys and men eat a side of beef.
Yesterday your child died and
had to be reborn again–only different,
now. The mind a cage–a key awaits
on the leather topped desk
next to the already unlocked door.
The torrid frustration of
not whether to walk
through the door,
but, rather, how to step over
the faint horizon of what was then,
what was next, and how does
the inconclusive and uncomfortable
now, bend to meet any of
these slippery arcs that refuse
to fold or crease???
Oh the tragedy of reading The Daily Gazette
or turning on the flickering mojo in the television!
And the only thing that matters is whether you get home,
wherever home is, with the people you love
and that love you, as well.
And as the green fights off the illusion of time,
piercing regret reminds you that it only
takes a millisecond for everything to change forerver.
And you make think that google can tell you everything,
but it cannot explain anything about the something that
turned to nothing and the turning back to something,
that’s different from something after the nothing,
but before then. Now, we see a different God.
Better than we ever could imagine!
Gleaning the past,
notes on shorn paper,
unrecognized passwords,
an unopened envelope,
her burial papers.
It’s late
And I’m trying to put my life in piles,
in folders, in containers.
Some memories are best thrown away.
It’s time.
