Musings and Meanderings

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Layoffs, lemon-cars, leave a sour taste
in her legal jargon-garbled mouthpiece.
Indiscrimination! Disincentive!
Overeducated, overfinanced.
Her problem-solving skills fail to de-ice
the block of lemonade laid at her feet.
Malevents come in threes, in yellow trios.
What comes next, she scries: Fate's malevolence.

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Idling

Waiting at the Ford dealership
to finalize a car purchase,
twenty conversations, a few
negotiations, a baseball
playoff, sales calls on the PA,
vie for my tired attention,
but I focus on this poem,
my bartering done for the day,
looking forward to the drive home
in my new-car-scented sedan
to show my wife and my daughter
what will now take us from Point A
to Point B for the next few years--
engine-idling time in verse.

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Placeholder With Vertical Alignment

Energy better used on effort, dark-energized.
Xanaxed muses power off their xylophones.
Counting the written over unwritten--contretemps.
Useless verbiage tracks across the screen, usurious.
Salient points lie unmade, lost in vacuumed sentience.
Elective abstention from composition spurs no elegies.
Sometimes the work does not work--excuses sum time.

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If a Myth Fails in a Kelp Forest, Does It Make a Sound?

Soft-shell lobstermen listen
to the catch in the sea siren's
quick-pincered voice, puzzled
at her veiled cross-references to
post-Byzantine, haremless life
and orthodox triune espionage
conducted beneath Mediterranean
subfloors and among Phoenecian
ruins excavated for touristic use,
shrug and return to setting traps.

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A Pattern of Breaking

Change is the pattern life follows.
She would like to change that pattern
for a few years--long enough
to recover, rebuild her life.
But change is the weave woven here
in this mortal, suffering world,
despite her dreaming, her wishing.
Change: the pattern she must weather.

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Tweet, Tweet

Commute mentor water-captures story taste.
Reasons, sleep-deprived, imagine strikes.
Intensity, storm, galactic discount, hacked
forever--bullet hands out evening wonders.

We lost choice.

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Just Call Me...

Failure smiles and gives me a long, warm hug.
Self Doubt laughs, orders me a Shiner Bock.

Hopelessness slides the bottle down the bar
to where I hunch, draw invisible knives.

It's damned easy to get comfortable here,
where every negative state knows my name.

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Ravenesque

I ponder forgotten daylight;
the ghost floor borrows
a surcease of shadow angels,

nameless in silken sadness
fantastic visitors entreating
entrance to my silent soul.

No longer forgiving, gone
with ungentle door knocks--
darkness here, there, filled.

Immortal dreams play unbroken,
echoing echoes, memory's throes;
back sweep burning caw calls.

I lift my arms, shadows coalesce,
black-feathered blurs surround me;
all thought ends, feather-smothered.

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Poetry, Later

Ten minutes--
the time I have
to write a poem.

Not a lot of time,
but I’ve written
poems in less.

I’ve also written
poems about
writing in short

periods of time;
I’m reworking,
recycling work

to get something
finished in too
short a period

for a glint-new
poem--this one
work-wiped anew.

This is what comes
of writing a poem
in a small window:

okay
stopwatch
poetry.

I comfort myself
with the knowledge
that I can revise

later.

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Terminal

She makes a batch of sugar cookie dough
just to eat it all raw--so very bored.

She wraps her hands in purple bandages
and spends an hour pounding a beef slab,

slices off a filet to roast over
her backyard fire pit and feed her wolves.

She juggles seven rusty daggers
until fatigue makes her miss a quick-toss.

She sits, surrounded by six fallen blades,
and stares at the dagger piercing her palm.

She doesn't call 911; she doesn't
remove the dagger or staunch the bleeding.

Her wolves crowd close, whine their concern for her.
She smiles, tells them, soon, soon she won't be bored

any longer.

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