| UNWRYMED TOO...
SITTING ON THE DOCK...My sandals
almost touch the empty crockery
of neatly stacked oyster shell,
betrayed by call of new moon.
I watch skinny Pinfish skim
the ripples, hemstitching to complete,
welcome mats where it's too cold to swim.
My dock's stout cedar poles never shiver
as I bend to soak-in my quaking reflection,
the sweet salt water lies and lies.
Inside, my lady and lover buzzes,
blind to my last publisher's rejection,
propitiously placed under the fly-swatter
decorating the sanitary white counter
where we shared cinnamon toast
and viewed yesterday's last rose.
That curt rebuff could explain why I might
venerate John Berryman's birth,
almost on the right day.
I do lean forward, posed to leap.
Such a waste in water three feet deep.
DANDELIONS GROW AT DACHAU-Peeking out
from slatted stoops and hidden crevices
where bleeding saffron stars shed seed
to grow sure proof of sin.
Bright yellow tufts spring forth,
persisting in their proof of shame
while penitent Aryan grounds-keepers
daily sweep away the past.
No detritus
of the subjugated horde remains,
and wasted cigarette butts and gum wrappers
are routinely sent to
politically correct incinerators
to waft a tame trace of penitent visitors.
Impudent
yellow bloomed weeds
wrap their golden blooms in buds,
shrinking away from the grandchildren
of the first garbage burners,
to escape a little longer and defiantly bloom
as tributes to the fallen and trampled flowers
that came before.
Living memorials
profane the sunny blue skies,
where Millions of jews were brutalized.
Dandelions still grow at Dachau,
flourishing proof that man
cannot eliminate what God has chosen
to reflect and echo his glory.
ALZHEIMER'S GIFT
My castle has been invaded,
the moat spanned and the walls breached.
Somewhere within
a prowler paws through my treasures,
purloining past and present.
Those precious gems of remembrances,
he sifts through with sticky fingers
and they disappear from view.
Capriciously, he teases me
with shadows of where they were.
This sneak will soon leave
taking away his every footprint.
I won't know he has stolen my name
and wiped away forever my oneness.
No longer aware of my loss,
will I be Victim or Victor?
MY FATHER'S CAR
Slanted rays of the late afternoon sun gild the
dust motes emancipated from the mohair cushions
by my sudden settling, intrusive and possessively
on their long tranquil couch. Rising in the reddened
rays they dance in chaotic patterns, like miniature
birds rising up from their cover. Some invade
my nostrils with traces and places of my father,
hinting of sojourns with his beloved Buick while
he could still possess his share of the highways,
and of his furtive sessions behind the wheel,
pretending the state would still let him drive.
I smell fragments of chocolate kisses from
floating flakes of untwisted tin foil wrapped
around his forbidden, high cholesterol treats
he had hidden in the glove compartment, but
from whom? Mother, already gone, no longer
policed his diet, and his progeny were too
engrossed in our obligations and his grandchildren
to monitor his poisoning of his blood from risky
treats nor would we forbid occasional life shortening
cigars, we could taste with his kisses. I could not
smell one wisp of tobacco smoke here in his refuge
from a youthful society, so I realize he would not
poison it's upholstery with the tell-tale tarry smoke that
had tortured and surmounted his lungs. I copied the
mileage from the odometer so I could place an
ad in the paper, extolling Dad's treasured Roadmaster's
low mileage and pristine condition on the back
of a receipt for a casket, and blurred the numbers
with fresh tears. How could I sell his car? Why did
we not seat Dad in his beloved Buick and inter them
together instead of in a casket with a suit didn't fit?
CRUSHING LILLY'S
My Love wished the water lilies
beckoning thirty feet from the shore.
I could not refuse my first love,
and set out, wading in soft mud,
stirred by bottom feeding carp,
Fickle fish,
whose slime I did cowardly fear trampling on,
worse than their suckling toothless bite.
She held the lilies
to her breast and we mashed
them between us.
My toes forgot the nursing carp.
I never crushed such beauties before,
but never will again!
BITS AND PIECES OF DEATH!
At twenty,
I danced with death and found
impermanence disturbing.
When again sound and healthy,
I reluctantly pondered how
my postponed death should come,
and now, I'm far too sane and cowardly
to crave the pain that buys
a hero's hallowed grave.
I favor calm ambush of death in sleep,
but not until I'm old and bored.
I keep enjoying death deferred in bits and pieces.
Supplies of forged body parts increases
while need of them, I reluctant realize.
Although I mourn as my body dies,
it's less of me, and more technology.
Dying, piece by piece,
now seems to me the ideal way to go.
As they excise my worn out parts,
replacements do suffice.
With death delayed by using proxy parts,
who can tell when my funerary starts.
I know and grasp
an increasing degree of death.
When they finally agree
that most of me has stopped and gone,
what remains?
Will part of me continue on?
THE STOLEN FEAST
George Washington Jones
sat down at the small table,
with little desire to eat,
but determined to consume every crumb
of the feast spread before him.
The ostentatious setting on starched linen,
promised the finest meal he would ever eat.
All of his favorite foods awaited
under the battered salver's cover
plus a few elegant delicacies
Jones saw only in old movies.
Though he was eating alone,
George had an audience
so he would not disappoint the staff,
although he was imposter,
and this splendid feast was meant for someone else.
No matter.
By the time the State found out that he
did not deserve the almost royal service
and his pick of all food choices,
George would be long gone.
He would not leave an assessable estate,
and for all he cared, they could exhume him
from the prison's burial plot,
and sell his tired bones to a fertilizer plant.
George Washington Jones,
death row inmate number 847653,
had warned his keepers
they were executing an innocent man.
THERE IS A STREET...
Called Internet
that heads straight to my house,
between open gutters full of filth,
deeper and wider than the street.
It is a crowded road and peddlers drop by
to sell me what I never knew I needed.
Strange bullies lurk within the throng,
indistinguishable from the regular pimps,
prostitutes, beggars, clowns and shady merchants
soliciting business on this street and daily banging on my door.
These anonymous bullies
destroy other people's treasures
just for specious pleasure.
This is a very dangerous street
on which I must travel for work
and use to visit my friends.
I must pay rent for a greedy monster watchdog
that is always a little behind the time,
and needs to be periodically updated,
his teeth sharpened and to have his psyche energized
and aggressions focused.
My virus eating watchdog,
loves the predators among the peddlers,
as they keep him needed and fed,
but always baffled by the latest invasion.
My watch dog may be self perpetuating,
clandestinely creating his own need.
RUSTED RIFLES
and broken bows hide beneath
drifting sage and shed dry tears mourning
their desertion by savages no one fears.
Savages grown soft on lard
and pale white bread forget
the dance of their gone
but noble dead.
Toothless and meek they stumble home,
each night and face find drunk squaws
they would rather fight.
Are these soft grandsons
the white man's enemy who bravely
challenged the manifest destiny
of those who stole Indian land
by two-faced ruse and laugh at Indians
now safely tamed by booze?
MY LONG DEAD SPINSTER AUNT
was a Republican from the day
she was born until she expired on the day
Richard Nixon resigned.
She was proud of her spinster appellation,
quite assured that no mortal man could despoil
her still pristine innocence, nor democratize
her concepts of meritocracy and inherited caste.
Her occupation was simply a well
endowed spinster though that was not
her occupation as she had never
touched a spinning instrument.,
Her benevolence was minimal
despite benefitting purely from being gifted, herself.
Anything she donated to the church bazaar
was used beyond expectation, suppressing her
was well used and with any noblesse oblige.
To live very well, my spinster aunt
never had to exploit a work force,
cheat customers or twist the truth
for a critical public.
She could truthfully now
be termed a spinster as she now
must be spinning in her grave,
sensing beyond her moldering years,
what Republicans now call spinning,
and the exalted status
the new republican spinster holds.
If you create unrhymed verse that paints a picture, tells a story, and has reason for being other than to obliquely babble mystery message and exhibiting word mastery, I would love to display your verse, here...
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