Best Bunk Poems
My Many Horn Haiku
when both knees would knock
would break my new precious clock
they crowed thrice each cock
each situation
mind needed explanation
remove word plantation
we were anemic
when they had a pandemic
would be systemic
with sugar coating
when we talked about voting
books to school touting
was a bunch of bunk
trump had been found in truck
all his actions stunk
had heard that each fort
and base needed support
as well as sea port
while riding trigger
image bigger and bigger
travelled with vigor
we are those who care
a mask must be sure to wear
have many to spare
saw Hickman crossing
library away tossing
they may be raising
Up again at three,
Before the bellowing guards and shuffling feet,
The fluorescent dawn still hours away…
Hands too soft for hard labor
Dig crusty scales of brief escape
From the corners of watery eyes.
Hope dims as focus returns.
From my perch I survey
A sea of black iron bunks.
Shallow snores, dry coughs, wet farts.
Their dreams like their tattoos:
Crude and incomplete, childlike and menacing,
As threadbare and tattered as our bedsheets,
As pale and shadowy as the naked bulbs
Ever-burning at each end of our
Pink visqueen sky.
Now I recognize this place.
There is no justice here,
No reform, no rehabilitation, no reward,
Not even retribution.
Just the labored slumber
Of dry hopes and dreams of punctured flesh.
I close my eyes again, awaiting escape.
HISTORY IS BUNK
Columbus discovering America? Yeah, right !
Only after a small army of Vikings from overseas
Traded and raided on the coasts for centuries;
And Brendan had navigated from Ireland to the Bronx;
Not to mention precolumbian wrecks of Chinese junks
Found in the sandy bottom of San Diego harbor;
And the Mongoloid footsloggers who tiptoed south to Ann Arbor
Across the floes of the Bering Strait ten millennia before.
Dreams in the Bunk
By Sy Roth
An aching tired eats away,
Slurping at his soul
Yearning wakefulness from the darkness.
He heaved.
Sigh in a soft world of crimson-waving flowers
Dancing away to his numbers etched on him, his scales.
The others turn, he with them
Intemperate mob
Waring in fisticuff frenzy with the bedbugs.
Their odor wafts in on the breeze
From the chinks in the poorly built walls,
A pig-sty pen for the downtrodden.
And their snoring, a milk-curdling vengeance
That threadbare cloth could not mask---
A chorus of caterwauling madness.
With it the dawn, still somewhat dark outside,
When permeable reality, aloft on a black steed,
Clip clops them off their boards, swaying under their weight
They disassemble themselves from the nightmare
Like nano-robots clicking off their nerves and senses
To march another day
To the tune, an assembled cacophony of scratching
And hats sweeping from their brows as the others jackboot
About them in their own jocular way.
Drink and ego made them bold,
And they could pretend to die through their night,
Their own snores a tuneful melody.
While the others dream of respite on their feet
Their muscles scream of the daytime terror
And the beasts feed on their determination to live.
I used to say the 's-word'
even the t-word (turd)
But after quite a long thunk
I've now come up with -- 'Bunk!'
Suddenly I'm the intellectual-type
'cos whenever I have a gripe
I sound just like a policy-wonk
when I articulate, "Oh, Bunk!"
In fact, yesterday my toilet backed up
and though - Shxx! - I couldn't fix it
The toilet spewed out some black junk
at which point, after a short thunk,
I screamed, 'That TURD really STUNK!'
Sailing solo is unsafe
and it's not much fun
one winds up talking to oneself
before the day is done
but a bad day on the water
or so someone said
beats a good day at the office
(and I would know)
snug in my bunk bed
so gentlemen here's a tip for you
as all good sailors do
(when they want to wee believe you me)
remain seated throughout the performance
when you go to the head (loo) or WC