POEM: Red Millipede

Hey, there, Mr. Millipede.

Shall I judge you by word or deed?

If by word, you’re big, stinky liar.

I counted 200 feet, not one higher.

“1000 feet” is pure exaggeration.

I say with no intended defamation.


By deed, now, that’s a different story.

You deserve all the accolades and glory.

I trip and stumble on just my two feet.

With 200, I’d never make it across the street.

How can your tiny brain keep feet moving?

Does each step need pre-approving?


[National Poetry Month: Poem #13]

POEM: Until You See the Flower Floor

It’s a post-apocalyptic scene.

Until you see the flower floor.


Concrete walls, bare but for paan stains.

Looking like a fresh massacre.

A murderous rampage

written in shotgun spatters.


A pack sits, rhythmically rocking,

hands mindlessly at work.

But with their backs to you,

you can’t see they’re stringing garlands.

Looks like the junky fidgets

of a Zombie horde at rest.

The impulse to tip-toe past, rationally quieted.


Then you peer over the rail to the flower floor.

The flower floor is brightness.

The visual gravity of oranges and yellows

exerts such an aesthetic pull on the eyes

that one can’t see any sign

of dystopian dreariness.


[National Poetry Month: Poem #12]

POEM: Foul

they stole her soul

put it in a hole


&


covered it with steaming shit

from the demon’s latrine pit

but they fouled up

it woke the pup

who knew a soul could vaporize


&


in a steam cloud it would rise


&


that breathed in by Cerberus

it’d make the beast more murderous



[National Poetry Month: Poem #11]

POEM: Happily Obsolete

You’ll never see a guy

shake his fist at the sky

and let fly the impassioned cry,

“I just want to fix typewriters.”


Some dream of escaping life in the hoi polloi,

pretending to be a princess, wearing a tiara toy,

but no one applies for the post of “whipping boy.”

[To take the beatings for said mischievous princess.]


And should you flush your ring down the toilet bowl,

you’re on your own, bless your plague-fated soul,

cause you’ll not find a tosher to jump down the sewer hole.

[Unless your time machine is set for London, circa 1850.]


When I look back at the sea of me’s.

I grin with glee and I’m quite pleased,

feeling totally at ease…

Because they’re all happily obsolete.


[National Poetry Month: Poem #10]

POEM: Found on Table

  • 1 revolver, used
  • 5 bullets, loose
  • 1 gas bill, past due
  • 1 electric bill, final notice
  • 1 slice buttered bread, nibbled

 

[National Poetry Month: Poem #9]

POEM: Ruins

blocks of rubble

corners & edges eroded round

bas reliefs dulled

&

adorned by jagged cracks


once the Earth’s most massive city

in its day London was a hamlet


thriving,

dying,

&

swallowed


infinitely patient arboreal adversaries

claimed the light

drilling down into cracks

making chasms

to set roots


strangler figs, literally,

strangled

figureheads



[National Poetry Month: Poem #8]

POEM: A Monster in Scale and Disposition

Lumbering lunatic slogs

through the moonlit woods.

If it comes upon a farmhouse,

it’ll eat

a chicken or

a goat or

a girl or

a boy.

They’ll find only buttons and belt buckles,

and maybe loose feathers.


It’s a monster in scale and disposition.



[National Poetry Month: Poem #7]

POEM: Edits Awry

“Punch that word into proper position,”

the angry god of grammar cried.

It started surgically.

Teams tapped in pry bars,

popped out words,

and spackled in a space or a substitution.

Then they found rot,

and it’s all wrecking balls and dynamite from here.


[National Poetry Month: Poem #6]

POEM: Brain Burrower

I rue the hearing of that tune

like a sandworm from planet Dune

it burrowed from ear to brain

where its bouncy pop egg was laid

but when the alien overlords arrive

fresh out of intergalactic drive

sitting parked up in our Thermosphere

we’ll offer them a welcome beer

they’ll think us weak in being kind

until we lodge that f@#%ing tune in their hive-mind

watching them gyrate in a spastic dance

their minds melted in a Zombie trance

like lemmings they’ll plummet from the ship

with that infernal tune on all eight lips



[National Poetry Month: Poem #5]