One-Liner Poem #69
i don’t enjoy one-night stands.
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I prefer lying down.
my hair brushes my hips,
long and glossy
with hundreds of split ends,
it is my pride and joy
in two years it’s grown a foot and a half
to make up for my freshman haircut mistake
I haven’t used heat on it in six months
and I’ve hair masqued, all naturaled, and oiled it up
but it’s holding me down,
tying me to this earth
the very weight of it,
the tension on my scalp,
causes a constant headache
vanity is a strange thing
I despise it and yet I weep every night
as my haircut comes closer and closer
for the first time in my life
I will have short hair and I dread it
I will tell the hairdresser that I’m sorry about the tears,
it’s nothing personal,
I’m just cutting off a two foot piece of myself.
I know he loves me like a hunter loves game.
That my neck is exposed and my eyes are wild.
That only swaying or collapsed I am beauty.
I know he loves me as a murdered and heavy thing.
Bloated and swelling and covered in dirt, in moss.
He hunts out of necessity, yet kills for fun in feral despise.
Pine Mountain Cemetery VIII
Tuck and Lige
There’s more than one secret resting
On this steep hill under stones or not.
Lige is buried just to the right, but
What you can’t see next to him lies
The best kin he swore he ever had. A
Kentucky Heeler, the village knew as Tuck.
For dogs, even good ones like Tuck, one
Finds a likely spot and that’s the end of it.
Not for Tuck. Never was that near enough.
Once saved Lige from a rattler in a battle
Scary enough to make a grown man run.
Dead snake, sick dog, long nights.
Another time he found a corn crib rat hole,
Smart enough to save the crop. Pigs
And Lige were grateful when snow flew.
Never a stranger crept onto the cabin,
Salesmen went round the other way, Tuck’s
Growl meant don’t think to mess with us.
More than snakes, rats and drummers
That dog was brother, child and mate.
He kept the house and man warm, safe.
Lige carried him up in dead of night, dug
Deep, wept, laid him in a soft leaf bed.
Kept silent, bought the lot so to rest right there.
Cemetery could and would see lot worse than
A friend that gifted every breath to a man
Who needed the love and care Tuck freely gave.
clock –
determine time
The clock returns
an approximation of time used.
The time used so far;
the number of seconds.
The standard allows for arbitrary
values at the start;
subtract the value returned from clock
to get maximum.
Note that the time can wrap around.
On several implementations,
the value returned by clock also includes
the times of any waited-for children.
(separate) information about the caller
and its children, may be preferable.
clock was implemented on top of times.
—
Found poem (erasure) from the Linux man pages
Original text:
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/clock.3.html
When I close my eyes
shapes outline the darkness there
but don’t blot it out.
O big-toothed shark, giant
python & elephant sloth, I’m not the type
to kneel at the altar, but ribs, jaws,
& teeth of the Pliocene Epoch I cling
to your tough remnants.
What it must have been before gas
pump & bullet. Before light switch
& cockpit. Your swampy
church with its jumble of snails
& slugs. Your warm oceans
gurgling multitudes. Cousins
in the thick trees with their long
red-brown arms & lemon-sized
brains. O gibbon, swinging branch
to branch. O orangutan, roving
the floor of the forest. I bow
to you as you nest high
in the trees, as you tramp
out a path for me, an arrogant
humanoid, waiting with weapons.
The manifesto of thunder
written in its electric scrawl
lightning carving a darkened sky
an anvil hammering sound
Lightning has a rich script
cursive, jagged, jolting
the sound of chaos chasing each line
there’s an order to the disorder
But what message can we read
tucked between those lightning flashes
chaos in cursive script
what’s the writing in the sky?
This storm is no Morse code
lightning has become a knife
carving its message in the sky
this is the manifesto of thunder
