laughter tears
laughter tears
snorty cries
blurry squints
snotty nostrils
flushed cheeks
throbbing head
tissue hands
crouching hump
restless sway
staggered mumbles
panicked heart
laughter tears
snorty cries
blurry squints
snotty nostrils
flushed cheeks
throbbing head
tissue hands
crouching hump
restless sway
staggered mumbles
panicked heart
With the news so uniformly depressing
I retreat to my kitchen
and make some pinto beans with a little bacon
and some fresh-baked cornbread
to sop up the juice,
and sit down to eat
with the ghost of my Aunt Addie at my elbow
clinking the ice cubes
in her glass of sweet tea,
waiting for me to ask the blessing.
March 9, 2020
Its as if my mind
Just wants to see what is here
While my heart wants to know
What is missing
I tried to marry
the silence, take it
inside like a package
of seeds, wait
for signs of fresh
buds & lustrous
blooms. I called it
opportunity. In long
wedges of time
I meditated, I imagined
neighbors reconciling.
It wasn’t until the eighth
month I realized the opportunity
was elsewhere. Of what
use are quiet epiphanies when death
is growing confidently like a Category 5
headed for the coast? Deeper
in the time of covid I plead
to the tangerine
sunrise. I try to take
faith in new life — early
blooming iris, billowing
like fresh spun silk, the forsythia
exploding in a golden
arrival. But some days
I am helpless as a vagabond
sheltered by rain-soaked
cardboard. Is it enough to remove
myself from the human
chain of infectors? Has someone
lived because I sealed myself off
from the sprinkled beads
of our breath?
A young man carries a soggy pizza.
Cheese and crust is not a dinner, I boo.
Come explore the terra incognita!
Of all the things that good taste could include,
you pick & peck for Italian fast food;
a young man carries a soggy pizza.
Wouldn’t you rather chicken, barbequed?
Couldn’t you muster clams, plate o’seafood?
Come explore the terra incognita!
How’s a bite from a diff’rent latitude?
Schnitzel, a curry, Columbian brewed?
A young man carries a soggy pizza.
Appetite, across from me, sits & stews.
Death of me, bites, but, most silently, chews.
Come explore the terra incognita!
Leftovers stuffed all up in yon pita?
Boxed about post-pastoral attitude,
a young man carries a soggy pizza.
Come explore the terra incognita!
This will not be a ballad
sung for Ouida Keeton,
nor a song to be strummed
for the history books,
only some words
in the form of some verse
to remember what always
shows true:
the human spirit
sometimes hides
something much worse
that what, at first look,
seems like it would do,
and sometimes, one gets
what one deserves,
and sometimes, one’s just
passing this world
through
inspired by a prompt for Write Across America via South Mississippi Writing Project
My body is a reed folding
like a Texas saloon player
playing it slow
and hands
grip to call more such
creatures to dinner.
I’m terribly picky,
and partial to oversized
semi trucks—
the buses carrying
Marge Simpson wigs
and hoverounds for the tourist’s
traps catch and chafe
my intellect. I’m better
than the Alamo, I
the little armored one, you see,
ruling the highway, a flirt
with oncoming traffic. I
grapple to trucks
like The Batman, claws
scraping the asphalt, I
dangle, rocking
back and forth to back
and clicking—klopfgeist.
This morning.
Breakfast
with a psychiatrist
treating me for rage—
I said
I wanted to matter.
I wanted to belong.
I am so tired
of the fucking armor plating,
this loneliness wears thin on
rolling fur bellied monsters
that hide like tortoises—
those wee suicidal tendencies
that rival jaywalking opossums
and road runners.
I told the good doctor,
my leathery shell and digging
paws would do to help me
find my resting hole,
and as armadillos have a very keen
sense of smell,
home is easy
to find. We are not easily deceived.
But
one morning
the fabled headlamp flash and horn
took me
sincerely
and entirely
by surprise.
In a close, dusty hole
on the side
of the desert freeway,
his plates of dermal
bone still linked to his frame
where he’d been hit by a car,
and rolled off-road limping
to his home listening
to the tumbleweeds.
Golden-green the light that bathes
this deck. Lexington Poetry Month
seems to depart and return as I tread
these boards, beneath these branches,
acting amid the scent of the wind, my familiar
curled around neck and shoulders, her heat,
her breath the muse of another June.
Social media grows envious. Her tongue lolls—
her Time Hop features knitting eyebrows
and correlation, forcing epiphany: This date
has seen 7 years of travel, or stagnancy
begetting lack of travel, house to house,
state to parallel state, nation to foreign soil
and each time, each moment, each recurrent
tail-end of June, since divorce, I have chased
identity—meaning—in the arms of someone
else’s roots.
Until last year; with fucking Covid
as my Tower, I planted a garden. 15 square feet
from where I sit, I razed dark earth and covered it
with rock, penned it in with rough-hewn brick
in order to release it, release myself, from the land
in which I was forced to live. These hands spread death
and solidity to bring new life and escape.
It is ironic and quaint to attempt to say: One trip remains.
Who am I to pretend I will ever shed the need to shed
the skin of place, to scrape myself across the rock
of distant spaces, expose an infant dermal transformation
to the elements so that if I claim to be a wise man, I might
know rebirth from fresh ignorance and grow,
grow,
never cease
to grow anew.
This current flesh-suit has suited nicely, but it’s served
its purpose; I will travel, once again, one last time—at least
one last time—that in transplanting the seed, however briefly,
I might recreate the sacred space, raze the earth, lay down rock,
depart from my familiar that I might return
a new creation,
tremulous and breathing—deep—cross-legged and fit
for meditation on a foundation of my own
craftmanship.
