Realism

I’m welling up at the worst times:
years of scales falling off my eyes.

Someone I love
said they didn’t believe any more.
Another two or three or ten
gone to glory, adding to the cloud
of witnesses, pressing on me.

“Go up and join this chariot,” over and over.
Sometimes I’m tired of running, sometimes
their lips aren’t moving when I get there,
sometimes it’s fireworks, but never

according to the way I ran.

Begun March 2019 and found in drafts in this strangely neglected blog

Photo by Paul Summers on Unsplash

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Raymond Chandler

several times I read each novel
by Raymond Chandler
enough times that I noticed
something about

why Raymond Chandler
failed in business once.
something about
why Philip Marlowe

failed in business once,
letting clients and lovers push him around
then Philip Marlowe
grew weary and wise about

letting clients and lovers push him around
enough times that I noticed
he grew weary and wise in the
several times I read each novel

 

 

 

Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash

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One Nation

A country emptied by the fear of war.
from The Dream of Lee, Reynolds Price

WE sat together in a coffee bar,
sheltered from the gentle autumn wind,
streaming the speech of Russian subterfuge
an out-of-style wartime
dream, a shadow war played out
on social networks filled up by the fear
of truth.

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Memorial Day

I sat yesterday at the scene of a previous poem,
listening to a unctuous woman recite M. L.
Greenwood’s God Bless the USA,
cringing at how poorly she scanned it.

Poetry is often the refuge of people stuck
between an old truth and a new expression.
and I respect what they’re grasping for, and I’m proud
to be an American

So I played marches with the band,
sitting under a tent in a parking lot
and listened to a recording of I Am the Flag
the high school JROTC played through speakers
connected to someone’s iPhone, while they
passed a folded flag to anyone
who wanted to touch it.

The ritual would not have been diminished by
Quaker silence, an undeclared question.

He played taps again under the tree,
a sweet, sad, eternal bugle call.

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How Soon the Sound

How soon the sound turns to gibberish, the
way form follows meaning into blind alleys. Listen:

I just got through playing Bach suites on
the wrong instrument for them, the wrong way,
most likely, but as it was it was meaningful,
as it was.

 

Written in response to a dVerse prompt: write a quadrille, using the word sound.

5

There is something I used to get

There is something I used to get
out of writing poems for no one, or not many
that I seem to get better out of writing
social media comments, replies
to great influencers

The feeling of bending something in the airwaves
the morse code static
a slight influence in the real world

but it’s not the same
not aspirational
it’s not occurring in a different, better room than the rest of my life.

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No Idea About My Past

I look at file dates and think
that was four years ago
and wonder what’s happening to my mind,
my perspective
what keeps happening
the accelerating rate
things keep changing

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The Dream of my Father

One month to the day
is when I finally dream of him alive
not counting half-awake forgetfulness
I should tell Dad about

We are both in hospital sharing a room
perhaps it is another accident
my reasons are vague, the mild, hopeful complaints
of hospital dramas where the patient goes home

And I cannot remember our conversations
In the dream, I can’t remember how I got there
which sounds like something serious, actually

Continue reading “The Dream of my Father” →
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Line Breaks

Test line
Hot damn 
By downloading Apple Pages
from the Apple Store
I now have an editor
which lets me do line breaks.This isn’t really poetry,
but it does have line breaks.

Now if I can turn off auto-capitalize in preferences…

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