dark poetry

Friday Fictioneers 9/18/2020 (Poetry: Joe’s plan)

Thanks to Rochelle @ Rochelle Wisoff-Fields-Addicted to Purple for providing another Friday Fictioneers photo prompt. Her weekly challenge is for us to write a story of 100 words or less based on a photo prompt (thanks to Roger Bultot).

PHOTO PROMPT © Roger Bultot

Genre: Narrative poetry
Title: Joe’s Plan
Word count: 96

***

Joe was okay for 96;
a walker, a bag, and caths.
not bad. no cancer.
she was long gone.
he felt guilty and missed her.

Joe had a plan.
one night, after the poker game,
the pain was too much.
at the hospital er, shingles, they said,
was not deadly.

Joe’s plan,
that night in his bathtub
he used his .38 Special
to join with her,
just past the veil.

Joe’s girlfriend found him, cops came,
hazmet cleaned up. some family members
dealt with his stuff. all they ever wanted
was joe’s money. now it’s finished.

***

Look both ways and wonder why, but death awaits all.
Mind the gaps and keep your powder dry.

Click for link.

Poetry: Another Morning

Awakened hours before sunrise,
he must guard, lest they come and kill;
this boy filled with fear and shock,
barely 19, taught to hate and kill,
now loyal to his clan, this new family,
his only friends, his only protection
as war has become his real world.

Miserable, hardened in every way,
unsympathetic, unimaginably deadly,
drawn to flashing light, learning
what he never wanted to know, addicted
to the battle, to the intoxicating fight.

He celebrates life with death, seeks random
revenge where none is possible,
has forgotten questions, never asks why,
lives in his personal accepted hated hell.

Sunrise lifts despair from his soul.
He smiles, alone, at the light of life,
happy to survive one more night.
He looks for answers, for that part of him,
now dead because he kills without a care.
Can he ever again be who he was born to be?

Look both ways to find another view.
Mind the gaps where questions decay away.

 

Poetry: Sammi’s Weekender #168 (peristeronic)

Hear pathetic, peristeronic sounds,
glorified pigeon’s monotonous cooing,
hunter’s prey, called white-winged Mexican Doves.

Sounds and shots signal long, hot, dry August days
in El Paso, Texas, at Walmart,
where hateful hearts sang out in murderous joy.

Supreme white-hot hate hammered home death
& destruction to familias con niños.
Pathetic politicians paraded past.

Look both ways into the hearts of men.
Mind the gaps. If you see only good, look again.

***

Explicación: Next Monday, 3 August 2020, marks one year since 21-year-old gunman and homegrown Texan terrorist, Patrick Crusius walked into a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, with his legally purchased assault rifle and murdered thirteen Americans, eight Mexicans and one German, and randomly wounded 23 other innocents, including children.

Poetry: dVerse Open Link Night #270 (my first)

Thanks to Mish and the folks at dVerse ~ Poets Pub, for Open Link Night #270 (click for link). This poem messes with where my head’s been lately.

***

Combatant

It could have been me.
A nod, a blink, an okay
and the next forty-five
years …

had I not been killed, maimed
or driven insane
(as many of us were)

… would not have been anything
like what I look back to today,
fifty-six long years hence,
with contrition, feeling the loss;

Personal, hidden, illogical
survivor syndrome. I can’t
make sense of it. The feeling
of a warrior who wasn’t.

Life choices often made
thoughtlessly, in a blink.
I could be dead. Change the past?
Not on your life or mine.

***

Look both ways at guilt for life: fortune or folly.
Mind the gaps in the mindless wars with reality.

Sammi’s Weekender #166 (hinterland)

Lannan banished him to Marfa, city of minimalist art,
in the hinterlands high-plains desert, a Trans-Pecos cowboy patch
in far west Texas. Controversial, wrangled, and angry (bless his heart),
Bloodaxe English poet Peter Reading endured being sacked

For having gallish cheek, remaining ununiformed 22 years,
being poet, For the municipality’s elderly,
as a mindless weighbridge operator and lover
of fine wine and birds, with gruesomely ironic humor.

Peter and I were born on the same Saturday,
he in Liverpool, I was not.
His revenge – Marfan and Shitheads.

Look both ways for hammering truthful humor
and light romantic comedy.
Mind the gap, said the man to the day tripper.

Poetry: End Times

You spoke, and I awoke,
yet I fear
the time is near
when the dark depressing truth
of humanity
will take root on its tail
and then devour itself to
end it all
forever. Maybe
that’s our difference.

You claim
god so wants it,
I say let’s ask
him
or her
or it
whatever.

Look both ways.
Because you were alive yesterday does not prove you will be tomorrow.
Mind the gaps in thought and deed.

Poetry: Impossible Void

The concept of non-existing,
of never was and shall not be,
the nothingness of nothing,
debated for eons, remains
impossible to prove or even
conceptualize.

Philosophers and scientists
since their first thought
have failed to define
an incomprehensible unreality
of utter insignificance that
many claimed existed,
but which really means,
never was there nothing.

Always something within
science; this physical universe
breathing change to essential matter,
random, yet never created or destroyed,
vast beyond human imagination,
becoming something else,
but never was it nothing,
always something,
forever and ever. Amen.

Look both ways to see into eternity.
Mind the gaps of deception.

Sammi’s Weekender: obdurate

Dying to Self

The obdurate lad labeled shallow,
his brooding nature, vengeful plotting,
lacked love, friendship, deep perspective.

The cold-hearted brutish Devil Dog
sought glory in death, salvation through agony,
shadows to kill without meaning or purpose.

Death and destruction his insensate shield,
as he was, he couldn’t survive
in this world at peace with love.

Curses of sympathy and empathy
mysteriously hatched humanity into his soul.
The old poet sleeps feeling thoughts of emotion.

Look both ways for the glory of Beowulf.
Mind the gaps in hidden emotions,
lest the beast of Cain’s progeny kill the stoic.

NaPoWriMo: 30 poems in 30 days (day 12)

Day 12 prompt: write a poem in the form of a triolet, which is fixed and straightforward: the first line is repeated in the fourth and seventh lines; the second line is repeated in the final line; and only the first two end-words are used to complete the tight rhyme scheme.

Thus, the poet writes only five original lines, giving the triolet a deceptively simple appearance: ABaAabAB, where capital letters indicate repeated lines. According to Lewis Turco in his classic, The Book of Forms, every line of a triolet is the same metrical length.

this is your nightmare I keep on dreaming
at my best doing that terrible war
don’t lie to me when I wake you screaming
this is your nightmare I keep on dreaming
the death of love for hate’s dreamy feeling
oh, nothing like this have I seen before
this is your nightmare I keep on dreaming
at my best doing that terrible war

Look both ways in war and dreams.
Mind the gaps for traps and schemes.

NaPoWriMo: 30 poems in 30 days (day 10)

Day 10 prompt: write one or more hay(na)ku poems, which are six-word stanzas where one word is the first line, two words make the second, and three words make up the third line. I made 11 (66 words).

Goodbye
often means
someone will die.

Life,
the source
of all death.

Find
what will
not kill you.

Would
you cry
as I did?

Care
not what
people will say.

Nobody
likes you
when you’re drunk.

Addiction,
part of
the human condition.

Sometimes
my poem
is not good.

Sometimes
it is
just another poem.

Exercise
is often
the best medicine.

Hayna?
is colloquial
to northeastern PA.

Look both ways crossing new roads.
Mind the gaps.
The pavement’s hard.