Call me Ishmael.
And if you write me
send it by fish mail,
addressed: high seas.
POEM: Great Characters in Literary History I
Reply
Category Archives: poem
POEM: The Missing Link
I called you on the telephone.
It turned out weren’t at home.
“How can this work, if you won’t pick up.”
I messaged, sipping coffee from my cup.
“I’m right here,” a voice did say.
A hallucination as clear as day.
This was no time to go insane.
Hitting redial, I tried her in vain.
No answer. I feared I’d become unstable.
“Hey, lunkhead, I’m right across the table.”
The voice matched by a pounding sound.
The angry poltergeist had me spellbound.
Then a splash of water hit my face.
Lashing out, angered at the disgrace.
“Oh, hey, how long have you been there?”
Rolling her eyes in a dumbfounded stare.
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
POEM: Mind Gravity: or, The Heft of Mental Putrefaction
Gravity pulls her head down into the pillow.
Like tar through a garden hose, thoughts flow.
Thoughts weighty, not freed of mass and matter.
As stuck in time and lost to reason as the Hatter.
Thoughts arise because they’re lighter than air.
Hers fell sodden, a lead balloon in the state fair.
The infection arose from a single putrid notion.
One drop floating free to fester across an ocean.
That she wasn’t enough. Enough for whom? Enough for what?
Unanswerable questions that congealed into a sluggish pus.
They say truth has weight, but truth lifts one to fly free.
What pulled her head to pillow was the mass of negativity.
As her thoughts hardened into a slag, devoid of truth or reason.
She summoned the strength for a search in her final season.
She scoured the four corners of the Earth for a fabled cure.
But it lie in a place close at hand, but vastly more obscure.
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
POEM: Kettle
an old tea kettle
bottom rusted through
sits propped on spout and shoulder
a vision of civility
kicked into the dystopian wasteland
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
Poem: APC
Armored Personnel Carrier
10 tons of angry seaweed green, a weighty sight when
viewed from Dal Lake in a languidly rocking shikara
the APC’s slits, the narrowed eyes of a suspicious lover
the shikara’s school bus yellow contrasts with the drab compound
that the APC guards
an abandoned hotel, confiscated and re-purposed
makeshift sheet metal walls topped with coils of concertina wire
Beirut, bullets swapped for rocks
a ramshackle guard tower of framing timbers and plywood
is painted green and draped with a camo netting
that serves only to create shadows
&
remind the guards they are still in the Army
camouflage that doesn’t blend with a decrepit block hotel
transformed into a hive of paramilitary activity
Shikara on Dal Lake
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
POEM: Tomb
thick-walled tomb
a slapping hand, numb and beet red
all sound absorbed
nothing passes
but a tremor
knocking loose a grain of sand
one sand grain for all the frantic panic
for all the screaming, kicking, and pounding
a grain of sand no one will miss
it’ll hit the earth without a shock wave
it’ll tumble into a pile of its kind, becoming indistinguishable
it’ll happen in the space between heartbeats
all that frenetic energy eaten by stone
the sum of a human life force in its final throes
muted by a tomb
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
POEM: the god of abstraction
tree on one corner
on the other a shrine
they hedged their bets
stood astride the line
they sealed their letters to the holy ghost
and slipped them in the midnight post
afraid of what their friends would say
if they mailed them in the light of day
each one believed in the abstract
a realm free of the force of fact
but when that ghost began to ride
they laced their cakes with cyanide
better to be crazy amid false gods
than run the table and play the odds
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
A Tongue-in-Cheek Poem
I know you feel my sex appeal
despite the lack of earnest squeals.
You should know, despite my glow,
the fans rarely stop to say, “Hello.”
Am I not a rockstar, superhero
because my visibility ranks near zero?
In this hour of superpowers
I think I’ll stop to sniff the flowers.
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
POEM:The Door
The door:
rusty hinges
weathered wood
rhomboidal sag
The lock:
clunky brass
formidable
sturdy, shiny, and
out-of-place
Who puts such a sterling lock
on such a pathetic door?
Who could be blamed
for lifting the lock
to feel its heft?
But when the slightest touch
tore the rusty, pointy wood screws
out of the door frame’s rotten wood,
it felt like a burglary in process.
But what could be worth burgling
behind such a sad, worn door?
The only thing worth thieving was the lock,
but it had a rusty hasp & staple dangling from it.
And a lock without a key is a paperweight.
One needn’t turn to a life of crime for a paperweight.
For the defining characteristic of a
paperweight
is that it be able to sit in place
and not go wandering about.
Anything but a cat can be a paperweight.
The door creaked when I looked inside.
I had to look inside.
Who wouldn’t look inside
to see what was worth guarding
with a big brass lock?
Inside: pure darkness.
Except the back wall,
where light strained through
cracks & slats.
I took two steps into the inky murk,
and plummeted down my own personal rabbit hole.
Share on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.
POEM: Humpty’s Mechanics
the best minds of my time
were bottled by assembly line
and all the world paid the price
when we popped the top and took a slice
they put the sections under the scope
but found nothing to give them hope
brain of greatness, brain of shame
microscopically, they all look the same
we knew the greatness by its absence
the wise don’t set foot in a lab since
but then, of course, there were the quacks
who tried to glue brain slices back
sadly they couldn’t see their flaw
unacquainted with the Second Law
they thought it was mere devilry
while thwarted by rising entropy
