Nightmare

I washed up from sleep with it,
tears in my eyes.
Something about my children,
about wasted time (I have never been away from them)
about regret (nothing on the day)
about loss (they all slept peacefully in the same house).

I asked what my dreams accused me of,
they crept back into forgetfulness,
having won their point.

Dream Sequences

So – another dream. Always a theme
of a plot of a moral, always something
that comes up from the ooze with me,
the MacGuffin in the comic book stories,
the dripping knife the wife holds
behind her back, just when you thought it was safe.

 

Pantoum: Flipping Channels

Andrew asks Jessica if he’s the father
Justin and Matthew argue over the estate
The decision is to spin the wheel or solve
Lose weight with this patented technology

Justin and Matthew come to blows over the estate
Christine and Susan console each other
Daily exercise in four minutes a day
Fourteen lost in charter plane crash

Susan asks Christine why it ended
The decision is to take the money or bet it all
No survivors in deadly A.M crash
Andrew asks Jessica if he’s the father

During the Sermon

I realize suddenly
that there are no details
to the stories, no stories
outside the scriptures read
and those stories compressed
into service only
to some didactic point,
like Lewis’
yellow spot on a map

Sonnet: The View from the False Door

There is little to be
seen outside my door
which doesn’t open. I see
a shrub, wooden fence, and four

houses ranged close, paranoid
in their huddled, gap-toothed
yards with their backs avoid-
ing contact with me. Truth

to tell, we all avoid this backyard
meeting. Privacy fences are tall
sentries against each other’s hard
gazes from kitchen blinds that fall.

We meet each other in the way
we wave politely at the end of day.

Not my best effort, but it is an English sonnet, and I wrote it in response to this dVerse prompt.

Some Do Not

he imagined that no man had ever been so tired
and no man had ever been so alone.

It’s a very British device
and Ford Madox Ford
pulls it off very neatly
here when we jump ahead

and suddenly the crisis
Is resolved.

But never how we wanted it to be.

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