sting
what scares me?
six A. M. screaming
on my street
a woman begs for love
drunk in her boyfriend’s car
like bee stings my heart
( I have allowed myself one rant this month)
Fishermen, loggers, carpenters, those
who put food on your table and mind the
Ten Thousand Things you need every day
but don’t usually think much about. In the
top ten jobs with the highest death rates
there’s not a fireman or cop to be found.
How about the next time a farmer gives up
his life trying to keep us clean City Folks fed
we have a parade of John Deere tractors
led by an F-150 driving slowly down Main Street
with a couple of teenage girls in the back
sitting on bales and slowly playing
Amazing Grace on their fiddles, their
only uniforms new pairs of Carhartts
and not a goddamned bagpipe in sight.
THE CIRCLE
Trees and grasses help make the wind.
They move it, it moves them.
All makes a circle
–creations and creators forever bound
in the circle
round
and round…
Our obsessions lodge
in our brains where
sensory details hand off to
neurons and synapses.
Are they really in charge?
Are we really in charge?
Is anything in charge?
Wired with morning coffee and sugar,
body’s daily dose of hormones
and vitamins,
we rush to our jobs,
our obligations,
our commitments—
the dotted line.
Every day we try soothing
our frayed emotions,
our frayed husbands/wives,
our frayed children,
our dogs and cats.
Our hands in the air,
our obsessions run through us
like hens with their heads cut off.
Sin—the thing we’ve blamed
for eons— is no more to blame
than the hatchet.
Idea from “Fitz Patrick Boisseau,” Michelle Boisseau, A Sunday in God-Years: poems, 2009.
The
day
was not
at
all
re-
mark-
able:
no
dish
ran a-
way
with
a spoon,
the Man
in
the
Moon
came
down
not
too
soon,
and
the sky
failed
to fall
as
origin-
ally
feared.
Last thing packed, the red
purse
you carried— all
this time,
one buck
still
tucked inside; they never got that. We wheel
you out same
door you walked
through.
Back to our schedules,
to WiFi, to our own
sheets and coffee cups,
our water
pressure, our dry air.
Sand in the crevices,
drizzling from our uniforms:
evidence that we ever got a break.
Sun tattooed into my skin,
slowly fading,
setting.
of a golden deer
under chestnut trees
braided with light
swollen with wonder
a pink rat and a mute parrot
ride his back
home to the land of kindness
where the wind tastes like pears
~ Found poem composed/modified from words in Maggie Smith’s poem “Apologue (I)”
————————————————————–
I want to travel the world
And freestyle with strange people;
Let them know, with a noble flow
That we are equals.
Full of good and evil,
Accepting and deceitful.
Painfully aware of life’s
Fleeting heartbeat, mental.
Vital instrumental,
Menial continual,
Punching with words like birds
Flying into your temple.
Digging a deep dimple,
Injecting intelligence into
This primordial American temple;
I’ll write it real simple.
Deliver very gentle,
Explain that life is assembly
And disassemble;
Comically accidental.
What does this resemble?
Extra existential experimental!
Currently turse, a turn for the worse,
So I grab my pencil & celebrate my potential.
Write a rhyme that is a protest monumental:
Truthfully transcendental;
Linguistic cylindrical tricks confront quixotic jurisprudential,
Aimed to slay ten confidential slithering presidental terrorist tendrils.
