Poem: Holy Knickknacks, Batman

Got my Indian Buddha statue
the next day
after some Catholic Answers lecture guy
told us it was a mortal sin to have one.
First Commandment (Catholic version), no less.

My graven image now sits with my Dragon Chalice,
lion statue, and cowboy with horse bronze art,
family photos, among other things.
He’s been lotus sitting around my house,
mostly in my room, for more than 20 years.
The best years of my life
have been with Siddhartha.

My family has concurred many demons.
I’ve beaten cancer (for now), completed 15 marathons,
written hundreds of poems, cheated death
and heart disease (also temporarily),
lost twenty pounds (several times),
and today I mark 75 years since I squeezed
through Mom’s birth canal. Sorry, Mom.

My mother claimed I was a contrarian.
Dad said I was only half-Irish and my sibs
considered me a spoiled brat (that’s still true).
The (younger then I) lecturer from the diocesan chancery
died two years afterwards.
Wrong statue or just superstition, I guess.

Look both ways at life and nature.
Question scripture. Make room for doubt.
Mind the gaps where you find them.
Buy a buddha. Acquire art because you can.

 

dVerse Quadrille #132 (stream)

A forty-four word poem (plus title) written for dverse prompt of stream.

Pluvial Passion

Let me feel your kiss.
May your wet tongue lick.
Run into my eyes, down my face,
under my clothes,
over my body.

My passion, you pour copious streams
of love upon me.

Touch me where you can.

Where are you, my sweet Rain?

 

Look both ways for summer showers.
Mind the gaps between the drops.

Sammi’s Weekender #219 (vivid)

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Vivid Memories

That first romantic kiss.
Nights in the wilderness
sitting by a warm campfire.
A mother’s smile, a daughter’s laugh,
the soft whispering voice of a lover.
Our child’s birth, your son’s success.
The smell of a grandmother’s hug.
That first buzz, never found again.
The gift of a young pet. The sadness
and loneliness of a beloved’s death.

Muffled lonely sounds
on cold snowy nights. My first bike.
A thing well done. Disappointment
overcome and rewarded. A road
less travelled. A baby’s accidental
soft touch. Moments in a lifetime.

Look both ways,
to the future for the young,
to the past for the old.
Mind the gaps but live in today with hope and happiness.

Poetry: Enigmatic Paradigm

Bukowski said
he dedicated much of his life
to avoiding people.
Humanity, he said.
Yet he wrote about people.
So, I assume he failed,
or he lied.

An allegedly unwilling celebrity
bemoaning attention,
lambasting unlively banality,
complaining constantly
about women. His ladies.
Many men, too.

I understand the blessing
of being alone.
I like many fine souls, yet I confess
to not always being kind
(yet not exactly cruel) to
undeserving deplorables.

Hank asks; is he ugly,
unkind (sometimes),
misanthropic, or misogynist?
Some thought so. Maybe he was.
I really don’t know.

Crackpot, with no hope of love?
Bitter and unfair?
Did he put glass in our sandbox?
Was he without morals or mercy?
(Maybe he was.)

Is he my phantom’s mask?
or am I his? Or yours?
What is truth? What love?

I neither know nor care
what most others thought
of Charles Bukowski.
He’s long dead. But
I read and re-read his poetry and prose.
I must have some reason.
Do I want to know my reason?
Do I care?
Or, is this one of those things?
His paradigm, or mine?

Look both ways when considering and discerning humanity.
Mind the gaps. Every day is judgment day.

Sammi’s Weekender #218 (tessellate)

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Geometric Memory

It’s one of those words,
comforting to hear and speak.

To say as tongues touch teeth,
not lips, a fun word to think.

Fifty years since projected
mosaics, as she asked,
“Does this tessellate?” We
learned patterned meanings.

No use for the word, till now.
Yet, I remember the day and teacher
who taught me how polygons tessellate.

Look both ways teaching and learning lessons.
Memories are forever but mind the gaps for irretrievable loses.

Friday Fictioneers 7 – 16 – 21

PHOTO PROMPT © J Hardy Carroll

Untitled flash fiction for Friday Fictioneers. 100 Words.

We were fifteen and looking for a place to shoot. I carried the pistol.

We walked railroad ties near idle coal mines.

Jimmy saw abandoned warehouses and ran ahead.

I heard him scream. I clicked off the safety and saw two men kicking Jimmy.

I yelled, “Stop!” One guy charged. I shot. I’d dropped the gun when it recoiled.

The other guy charged. I picked it up and shot two more times. He tried to run away. I shot again.

We pushed the bodies down an old coalmine shaft.

Jimmy is gone. I alone know where those assholes are buried.

Look both ways and keep your powder dry.
Mind the gaps between the ties.

dVerse Quadrille 131 (juke)

A 44-word poem using juke.

Honky Tonk Attitude

Joe Diffie sang it differently.
Prop him beside the jukebox,
but now what?
Joe died last year.

A pre-delta
corona virus victim.

And we got no jukes.
All the bars were closed.

Joe’s gone to heaven,
I s’pose they got
him a good jukebox.

Look both ways, mind the gaps,
and be careful what you wish for.


***

From dVerse. Click here to play or read.

Sammi’s Weekender #217 (requisite)

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Tread At Your Own Risk

American men and women at war,
fighters. May I call them warriors?
For their military service
we want to thank them.
Combatants
share experiences
only they understand.
Only they feel it.

Requisites are hated enemies,
courage, weapons, desire for glory, fear,
comrades, pride; and a cause
to die for, one worth killing for.

There’s more.
Much more.
They carry much.

To fear death, or not? To love
and despise simultaneously?
Is war forever part of humanity?
Are we the only creatures
that kill our own for no reason? Just to kill.
To cause death unnecessarily?
Is that combat?

Look both ways for glory and dishonor.
Mind the gaps between mind, heart, and soul.

 

Poetry: Limestone Walker

That so-called stone surface facial of
sedimentary calcium composition
of old fossils, fragments, and ancient scree;
rocks of gray, white, yellow, or brown.

Ubiquitous to trails I hike,
fine for stepping over hazards
or tripping face-first onto hard rocks,
or into some mud puddle or other.

Soft and effervescent in any acid,
yet porous enough to spawn tree or shrub
growth or provide unlimited grot hiding places
for so many critters of the Texas wild.

In a metamorphism of glory,
stones ugly and pitted,
covered with algae, moss, and mold;
magically recrystallizing into fine marble,
given enough time.

Fittingly, oxymoronic as soft rock
used as stones for walls,
or as naturally difficult primitive paths,
or cliffs to climb,
or pathways to find,
so many new trails to blaze.

So much staining, like inked tattoos,
painted with organic rust;
constantly crumbling, chipping,
peeling, spalling, weathering,
and eroding away;
just like me.

A stone-cold darkness arising from dampness,
striving to save archaeological history,
the professional province of geoscience,
ignored by hikers and walkers, but not
missed by the conceit of poets.
We seem to see it all.

Look both ways and watch your step,
for real and with a metaphor.
Mind all the gaps. Trip at your own peril.

Sammi’s Weekender #216 (tether)

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Human Proclivity

Having descended recently
from progenitors, through
many millennia, I am tethered
to an inseverable past, a chain
of evolutionary becoming me;
this “I” is very much of that,
of then, literally of them.

Subject to the will of nature,
this intense soulful belonging,
universal humanity, who taught me
to walk, run, eat; to pee,
and to talk. Into the wonderous wild,
not benign, to risk danger, to
create art, to live as human
now, to feel art in my nature.

Look both ways and live for today.
But we are products of a past not our own.
Mind the gaps for more questions than there are answers.