Posts for June 2, 2019 (page 7)

The stars show us things
I see them back home
Happily dancing there
I wish I could join them
but I know it will never be
here so far away,
just glad the nights
kind enough to
show them to me

When leaves turn golden,

It’s time for the fall fashion show.

Standing between aisles of her outfits,

A woolly bear caterpillar wonders:

Which is her best look to go?

Who would be the best designers

For her thirteen-section gown

And her eight pairs of shoes?

Does it really matter

If wool covers top to toes?

Out of a rainbow of colors,

Pick out the best shades of wool,

Black for elegance,

Or brown for sophistication.

She’d better get the two.

Against the background of murmurs,

Cameras flash as she wiggles.

The catwalk is all hers.

Grace and authority

Linger in her pace.

Anxiety races through her audience’s hearts,

For the thirteen weeks of winter,

Will be decided by the intricate details of her gown.

Will their muscles ache from shoveling,

And when will seeds need to be sown?

They are desperate to know. 

The limelight dims. 

Snow thickness? She shrugs and smirks.

Really? Why would they make a fuss?

“As long as her heels are taller than the snow . . . .”

A Map of One Year
Retracing My Steps

Out of Nowhere
Glass Corset

Talking Burley
Let’s Do It Live

The Truth Is
Better Than Sardines

(In order of appearance, titles of books by Karen L George, Jayne Moore Waldrop, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, Teneice Durrant, Sherry Chandler, LexPoMo2018 anthology edited by Jude McPherson, Avery M. Guess, Dennis Preston)

I immediately thought of Tammie
And my balls felt light
Like apples and began to tingle
While I sucked the deepest
Dew of resonance
Out of that cough drop
I was crunching up
Inside her eyes the blood of
A miracle was pounding and
About to overtake me
In her thin smile brand
The sign, the knowing pout
Made pain wistful and numb forgiveness
When she turned a little
Furious of amber eyes,
Yet budded with a sigh
And I owned in the
Hardest thrusting quest
Of my hero martyr nature
That I had felt her fully
And more quickly than she wanted

That it was over
Yet she would take some unknown
Witch’s satisfaction from my
Numbered manhood later
In the dark cool cave
She would have dragged me down to
Then made it fire

Tonight

I was a teenager again

or maybe it was for the first time,

because in every other summer I’ve just been

a kid.

It is the first day of our last summer,

and we realize we can neither call ourselves

high schoolers, nor college kids,

and I say,

this is the freest we’ll ever be.

Here are

the few of us

on this sweetly humid day,

collapsed under the shade

of the trees that have grown with me

for almost eighteen years.

Left with sticky skin

and calloused feet,

we lay our heads in each other’s laps,

feeling the warmth of our bodies

and of the honey sky that wraps us up like a blanket,

protecting us from the thought of tomorrow,

allowing us to enjoy

the feeling of being label-less

and limitless;

of not owing anything to anyone,

if only for one summer.

If this is the only summer

I’ve got left

to be a teenager,

and the twenty-five days I have left

before I leave that word behind me;

before I owe the world anything at all,

then

I plan to be

the freest I’ll ever be.

Ever since I discovered the magic 
of a winding road up to the top 
of a nice view, I have been searching 
for places that feel far away from 
whereever I am.  Today I took a stroll 
along the Falls of the Ohio, twenty five 
minutes from where my dog and I 
lay our heads. 

Stopped in at a local ice cream spot, and 
ventured further than the trail asked of us. 
For exactly ninety minutes we were 
two beings becoming something
completely new. 

I plug in my IPad.
A misnomer, of course.
Who makes calls anymore?
Even I, looking hard at 70,
have succumbed to the ease,
the detachment, of text.

I plug in my IPad. 
It gobbles juice
as I google, scan, and delete,
delete, delete.

I plug in my Samsung.
It doesn’t connect me
to Instagram, to Snapchat,
or to the cloud.

It connects me
to my body,
allowing it to carefully 
keep its own pace.

just enough to catch her eye through the twilight room and cigarette smoke. He could be keeping time with the band’s decent cover of that song she sings him while they do dishes together before settling in for the evening. It’s a sweet song, and when he joins her in the refrain their voices together sound decent, too. And then she thinks maybe he’s remembering touching her there, right there, which makes her think of her body twitching in response. It’s a sweet feeling, and when his body joins hers in the final verse, well, they’re pretty damned decent together, too.  

Hey You, 
i wont do 
any damn thing that you tell me to.
Watch me melt, 
Or watch me bloom, 
watch me fuckin’ come unglued. 
Break these chains,
break your face,
and everyone will say…

Now that’s a Punk Rock Rating

Tonight, we roast shiitake mushrooms.

The new bacon; bombastic meat-veg.

We open and close our lips.

We sound like wet soil, birth of spores, taupe.

I can hear olivemoss and creeping grays.

A humid smile turns up in your eyes.

We are eating older these days.