Poetry

Monday’s Rune: fear

 

Solicitude—

I fear my last day
but not my death

I fear loneliness
but not being alone

I fear pain
but not its causes

I fear love
but I love loving and being loved

I fear the strike
more than the pitch

I fear my own anger
more than I fear that of others

I fear decline of all kinds
but not being old or slow

I fear the worst
but I try to do my best

I fear the sudden stop
but not the long fall

I fear within me
feeling fear itself

But most of all, I fear
anger born out of my own fear.

Look both ways when feeling trapped or controlled by fear. Paranoia runs deep.
Mind the gaps where you might find the reasons why.

 

Monday’s Rune: Columbus Day

Got Yer Number

You sailed the ocean blue.
In fourteen-ninety-two,
and whatnot.

We love you less.
Five hundred years later
and your victims more.

A national Monday holiday
in a land and country
nonexistent for another
three hundred years.

One you never heard of.
One you’d never understand.
One with statues and tributes
to you for getting lost.

Facts are facts.
History
less of a mystery.
And me,
‘avin’ ta work on
Saint Paddy’s
of all troublesome things.

Look both ways and try to appreciate reality and history.
Mind the gaps they drive deep to hide the truth.
Some heroes just suck.

Sammi’s Weekender #280 (amok)

Click this to open Sammi’s page where you’ll find more fun prose and poems run amok.

Small Battles: Big Wars

We
would rather f-bomb
or recite angry litanies
of forbidden witchery
than speak the word: cancer.

It’s when few of one’s
trillions of cells run amok,
it’s a war fought with
knives, rads, and poisons.

Look both ways to see your own beginning and end.
Mind the gaps, fight the battle, die with dignity.

John Updike, best known, perhaps, as a novelist, was a poet. This short poem of his is one of my favorites regarding life and death. He died of lung cancer in 2009.

Monday’s Rune: For Sale or Trade

No Quid Pro Quo

I have nothing at all to sell.
Or to trade.
I walk alone because
we must.

It’s just me
with my own thoughts,
maybe music or a book,
as I deal with some pain.
A good thing,
claim my many doctors.
Not the pain—the dealing with it.

I like the thought of it—alone time,
but it’s not. Not really.

The Universe, also not for sale,
is with me. Always with us.
I call it being alone
because it makes me feel good,
but I know

I am never totally on my own,
without a piece of eternity
talking some quid pro quo.

Look both ways when dealing, feeling, or logrolling.
Mind the gaps between your steps and use the poles lest you fall and break your nose.

 

An oldie and a goodie from Mr. Poe.

Sammi’s Weekender #279 (superimpose)

Click the superimpose graphic to link up with other excellent wordsmith 56 wonders.

Contemplative Satisfaction

My memories are superimposed,
each one over the others,
repeating forgotten things
like reflections in a window
to my past.

The sights, sounds, and sensed emotions
I can no longer feel, hopes and desires
of mine in a younger man’s clothes
when I danced and played
not knowing about the treasures
that are my memories today.

Look both ways and overlay the tastes and aromas of each memory.
Mind the gaps of confusion as you look through lost time for meanings as we live into the answers to past questions.

dVerse ~ Poets Pub Poetics: The good and the evil

This poem was rendered to meet today’s dVerse challenge offered by Paeansunplugged from Delhi. We are to write about the good and evil in mere mortals, the good in evil and/or the evil in good. For me, at no time is that enigma more profound than in times of war and battle.

Conundrum War

One story I’ve never told,

a confession…

if evil were evil enough,
if good were good enough,
I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage…
but courage, too, has finite quantities,
yet it offers hope and grace to the repetitive coward.

I can’t fix my mistakes.
Once people are dead, I can’t make them undead…
killing and dying are not my special province.

Am I too good for this war?
Too smart, too compassionate, too everything?
I’m above it. It’s a mistake, maybe.

Look both ways at good and evil or take Hamlet’s advice and think it so.
Mind the gaps between and within our perceptions of what is better and what is truth.

 

Click the soldier for more good and evil poems.

Monday’s Rune: Speaking of Rude

Touché

Everything
I say and do,
makes me,
according to some
(hope not you),
sexist, racist, communist,
capitalist, atheist, and/or —
something else bad-ist,
or worse,
and so on.

The epithet “snowflake” implies
a melting softness, unlike icicle, and is both
insulting and a grounded gauntlet challenge.

I’m being verbally shoehorned in
by short-sighted, narrow thinking
like an ugly foot that doesn’t fit.

I could well
go off with my own difficult ways,
and face my personal world
for the rest of my days,
and forget to fit
their stereotypical clichés,
which some seem hardened
to claim that I always am.

That would be
such a great blow
to the cause
of human equality.
Since then,
all will see
and we will all be:
collective assholes,
magnificent they and
malevolent me.

Look both ways if you intend to make anything better.
Mind the gaps, saps, and crap chaps and be who you are—the real you.

And something better and deeper.

Monday’s Rune: The Value of Time

 

When Dad’s a Dick

I returned to your place of business, like I said I would.
A clown-man there told two jokes. At first,
I glared at him to the silent end. The other
I interrupted so I could give you my coffee order.
I allowed him to finish. I again stared
before telling him his joke was unfunny and that his
comedic skills were woefully lacking behind his
overflowing obnoxiousness. Was he your father?

You would not take my money. He paid.
I sat quietly, typed my poem, drank the
Americano and chewed the muffin.
Now I wish I hadn’t. You
did not look at me or say another word. Then,
you left.

Sorry. Henceforth, the city library
has much more to offer and
better silence, too. No jokes.
Is Divinely Beautiful your real name?
Tell your father that my low opinion
of him has declined and my vote
is not for sale.

No apology necessary.

Look both ways but think on your feet.
Mind the gaps of silence when the wind passes.

Expect the unexpected, they say. How?

 

Sammi’s Weekender #276 (bandage)

Click the graphic for Sammi’s blog and more bandaged 61-worded wonders.

Keepin’ Safe

‘hello-‘ello! C’mere, lad.
I hope you’ll be keepin’ well.

It happens every year
after a wee bit, a donnybrook
somewhere near here,
sorry now, so
me shillelagh’s swingin,
callin’ fer bacon.

Not well then are ye?
wackin’ the cod,
wi’ narry a nod, nor a bandage
or pad to be had.

T’ank you for feelin’
brave to go, smart to not.

Look both ways on whisky drinkin’ festival days.
Mind the gaps at the tube and lads at the pub.

The annual Donnybrook Fair near Dublin included fiddlers and dancers, but it was best-known for the frequent eruption of whiskey-fueled fighting – often involving heavy clubs known as shillelaghs. “Bacon” is Irish slang for police and “cod’ for fool.

Monday’s Rune: On Labor Day 2022

Let Me Clarify

They were not smart or rich. Some might write. Few to none finished school. In many ways they were all slaves.

The children, the men, and the women were trying to survive, to make it through the night.

No great athletes, not a genius among them. The company was the enemy. The boss.

I think of them on Labor Day. About my dad, the filthy coal miner, who swore I’d never work in the mines.

He was right.

When the mines shut down, he was lucky to find any job. He was a plumber’s helper. He mowed lawns and dug sewer ditches. Finally, as a nurse’s aide for the same pay I got as a teenage knucklehead, for my summer job, as a gardener’s assistant, he worked until it was finished.

Mom was a cleaner of footwear in a shoe factory. She had to take two early morning buses and often walked home. Her hands were always dirty and stained from cleaning factory shoes. Sucky work.

I never did piece work, nor had black lung, but at a young age I knew all about both.

Labor Day! I love it, but the more I think about it, and the more I learn about the labor movement, the more pissed off I get.

Wars and soldiers did not build this country. The rich damn sure didn’t. Cowboys (not the jerks in Dallas) and labor did. Workers built America.

Damn it!

“No gods, no masters.”

Look both ways and try to understand.
All workers and all labor around the world are brothers and sisters.
Mind the gaps and may we treat them well. Welcome to America.