The sun was starting to get a little low
when I parked the car in a parking deck
in Jacksonville where I took Southwest to Oakland
We stopped somewhere in Nevada Continue reading “Pantoum: Mass Transit”
What I Learned By Not Thinking About It (draft 2, dVerse prompt)
It wasn’t that important to solve anyway,
which is good, because it doesn’t yield
to analysis or much of anything.
Even in physics we learned one can observe
vector or velocity, not both,
which leaves room for something. Call it God,
but not the god of flannel cutouts in cigar boxes,
musty Sundays, leading us to ever more thinking.
But it’s not nothing.
Or if it is, it’s the type of nothing
expressed in the tired old lines:
Have you seen my wife?
Is she about 5’2″, red haired, wearing a blue sweater?
That’s her! Have you seen her?
No, man, I haven’t.
Dog Wandering on the Road
The dog wanders on the road to my neighborhood
about where fields give way to another subdivision.
All I know at first is the cars are moving strangely
my reptile brain detects a pattern problem. Continue reading “Dog Wandering on the Road”
What I Learned Not Thinking About It
It wasn’t that important to solve anyway,
which is good, because it doesn’t yield
to analysis or much of anything.
Even in physics we learned one can observe
vector or velocity, not both,
which leaves room for something. Call it God,
but not the god of flannel cutouts in cigar boxes,
musty Sundays, which leads us to ever more thinking.
Conjugating the Pick-Up Line
for S.D.
This isn’t a come-on, but –
he says, and you wait for something so clichéd
there should be a grammatical case for it –
the unbelievable inevitable,
perhaps, or way past tension:
the sense it’s all been said before,
with better lines and timing. Continue reading “Conjugating the Pick-Up Line”
Poetry on Deadline
I don’t want to post
another retread so have
a haiku instead.
The Road to Emmaus
For this reason the gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.
1 Peter 4:6 NKJV
I walked a long road for this home-going:
tangled paths of memory. You both assumed
it was a trick. You were expecting flowing
wounds, blood-torn back—I looked as if hewn
from rock, and not a grave that thought it had me.
Peter, you were right, but didn’t see:
everyone had the same eyes. To be
drowning, to have your soul (demanded
from birth, the owed death waiting) returned—
all one, all the same. Peter, everyone dies,
but not all live. Some choose to burn
in prison, waiting to be freed. Why
judge the dead until you walk the sea?
Even the death of you will live in Me.
Christ Calls Peter
A bit out of sequence, but… this is from a somewhat neglected collection that I need to get back to work on.
Christ calls Peter
We cleaned nets which stank from a long night
of nothing and mended them where the sea
snagged and tore them. He wanted to talk.
Not to me, but to the mob coming with him,
a rabble that made me and James look
like tax men. Continue reading “Christ Calls Peter”
Golgatha
It hurt worse than expected,
feeling my soul pulling free,
like meat off a bone, like arriving
when she told me Joseph died—
I knew, but now I Know.
Drunk with pain, down to go deeper,
to get under all of it, down under
the staggering load.
It was hard to be there for it, hard
to see her seeing all of this, hard
to explain, even if I could have,
that it was all merely a stage,
the necessary pain, evil, darkness,
delusion.
And then it began.
I set my iPad down
on my grandmother’s old table,
wondering what I can’t anticipate.
poetrytech 