The meds are kicking in
for sleep I slept five hours last
night the streak remains
Ulysses S. Grant
I rise only to say that I do not intend to say anything.
– Ulysses S. Grant
I wrote as I did
in a spare craftsman style
knowing men died
the entire time I wrote
the entire time they read.
A man could be shot
while hacking though
the thicket of words
created by some generals
and die before he could act.
Knowing, then,
I wrote to dying men
and sometimes sent my dispatches
back to the living world
I demanded clarity of myself.
I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This
is the line that always comes
before the thing he shouldn’t be telling her
but the reason is not the obvious reason
but the thing he doesn’t tell her.
Haiku: Concentration
I didn’t get fifteen
minutes to myself enough to
Think through a long form
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.
140 leaves 137
140 leaves 137 A space is a line feed is a period and any of them could leave you with no time to say, or time to say too much. To go back
— Poetry Tech (@poetrytech) January 10, 2014
A response to a dVerse Prompt. Go make your own!
Pantoum: Album
A scene in The Birds
reminded me of the time
you told me about the time
the old man kept calling you Miss
which reminded you of the time
you played an old woman in a play
in which a young man calls you Miss
We were standing in your kitchen
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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