Press

A rapacious media
disembowels each
politician in the glare
of public scrutiny.

More privately,
the emerald male
praying mantis
chooses it’s demise.

Month-end

Mortality is one ending.  Do books die?

They reach their natural climax and
I'm sad to realize that the books-worth
of characters, who were with me just
one moment ago, are gone.  White page,
northern landscape and memories —
the well-trod morphology
of all those exciting memories.

You Gotta Hide Your Sonnet Away

in this click-away world
Romeo looks for porn on
his i-pad and Juliet brushes
up on her icons and
trashes the Biebs forever

this war between families is
all about bikes in the hallway
and late-night deals behind
the dumpster and screams

yes there are always screams
rattling down the rooftops

EMS arriving screams about
the blood and the police are
never too far behind the event
though the child with the
welting face might disagree

always a war of words which
leads to events

you gotta love this urban
hideaway even though
the Tim’s on the corner closes
at midnight and doesn’t open ‘til four

Age As A Word

When I feel old, I think of words —
those which have been around
so long that their original meaning
is lost in layers of myth, that creak
dusty from the tips of arcane books.
I think of Neanderthal man, a knock
on the mind’s door and that question —
do you remember me — as though
I’m being asked to remember
the name of an old friend now dead
twenty or more years,  when all
I can think of is an autumn day,
 light rain, leaves rummaging along
the ground with earthworms, and
that odor of rubbed grass — that
delicious odor of grass — that’s
what I remember, not what I called
an old friend.  My hair is gray,
half gone, my hands shake, but why —
I have forgotten to remember.

A Murder of Words

Not paint, though color is suggested.
Perhaps then mere suggestion, though
it must live somewhere to be created.
Perhaps  on a small-town street were
summer stretches in to autumn, scratches
at the hulk of winter.  A wife and children —
two — a modest mortgage and modest job,
a dog, used car and garden in the back yard —
all this on the pallet, all this waiting for
a brush.  The mumbo-jumbo must be
in the arrangement, as it is in a bouquet —
a rose here, a carnation there, such opposites,
they attract the inner eye and live.  Perhaps
it is what I bring and blend in.  I know what
makes me cry, what makes me laugh, I know
the scent of tobacco in a late-August field.
Perhaps it is nothing more than the sight of
this murder of bound words, the way the sun
catches the maple tree, the way the wind
catches in the door’s screen web, the way
a word hears the coming evening, spreads
its wings and soars, bathing in the texture of wind.

Winning

There is no demarcation
between desire and the
mules which deliver.