5
The path to peace
is
not
linear.
We were caterpillars
growing fatter and fatter
building up green goo inside us,
until finally spinning silken shrouds.
Were we waiting for Lazarus to reach us
suffocating wrapped in our sheets.
He is not coming back this time,
but neither have we died.
Fingers pushing apart strands of silk,
entwining legs and arms in the dark,
we rise gently on air as sweet as nectar,
in sun as warm as a lovers’ embrace.
What have we become that we must leave this place.
My childhood secrets
imagining.
Read Nancy Drew
fancied myself
a budding detective.
Prowled the neighborhood
looking for crimes
and clues.
After the movie
Boy Who Cried Wolf
stalked for seeing a crime
imagned someone
following me
for seeing something suspicious.
Read Secret Garden
determined to find one too.
TV Lassie saves a neighbor
believed our collie
a future hero.
Created my back yard secret space.
Believed like Dicken
that critters would come.
Then a turn into teen.
A change in my fantasies.
Elvis and boys.
-Sue Neufarth Howard
You can best serve civilization by
being against what usually passes for it.
-Wendell Berry
It’s the down hour again.
The city traffic comes central through itself.
The flat scrubby deconstruction acres–
once live maples grew on Maple Street.
Now a central highway is the only live
position, the couples inside the houses
widening like the interstate.
Interstate between my here and there:
a trip, a bear, then evergreens.
Deconstruction.
Excavators widening the Kentucky of things.
Our used up hour began a couple pasts ago,
this center deconstruction.
Link: http://www.languageisavirus.com/diastic-poem-generator.php
wears tight shoes and mismatched socks
is a sinus infection reaching for Kleenex
types in Michelangelo, pulls up Paw Patrol
is early Alzheimer’s with pretentions
shovels at mountains with teaspoons
is a lost dog nobody wants to find
lives in a van down by the river
The patronizing hymn
Of the summer air pierced me
Like you were sinking your teeth
Into me once more
The hot air singed my skin
Enough to make the pool water
Repel off of me
Just like the way
You had grown to
This used to be our equinox;
Our turning point
Where we went from
Platonic soulmates
To star-crossed lovers
I thought the heat
Wouldn’t affect me the same
Now that i’ve locked
My new pet inside of my cage
But you hold the keys
And you dangle them over me
As the humid air
Left you sticky on my palms
Maybe this year
I will finally sweat you out of me
And we can both lay freely
Getting scalded by the sun
3 sheets of paper,
gone missing.
Gnawing fear
in the pit of my stomach.
Shitty photocopies
taken with an app on my phone
are all I have left
to prove my child is
my own,
that she is a legally allowed
to call our home her own.
You cannot see it in the shape
of her eyes,
the curve of her smile,
her tangle of jet black hair,
but she’s mine.
Don’t
judge
a book
by its back,
poem by its form
or a concert by its venue.
Remember the lurid pulps that cradled the noir of
Chandler, Hammett, Highsmith, Cain, “pointless villanelles that
go nowhere” like Bishop’s One Art,
Roethke’s The Waking,
and never
forget
Wood-
stock!
