Long Calves Poems

HEROES

Near somber guards, units of children heap 
dead leaves, naive to any else fallen.
Friend, you chuckle, but your posture speaks
of duty on this day of contradictions.

Firefighters bow heads in silent paean, 
while polished trucks stand...

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O’ my dearest love,  
I gather the world’s rarest petals for you—  
Ghost Orchid fragrance lingers  
in the marsh’s quiet air  

look, love, it fades  
then rises in  
the...

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From my lowly bachelor’s house
Proudly christened ‘Embassy Fair’
I woke up to the chirping of birds
On the trees above and across the vale
And the riverine bushes in-between
I woke up to the crowing of cocks
And the mooing...

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Not too many decades out of college
I finally landed my first full-time job,
as a White House speech writer.

I know,
you would expect
I would not start at the top
and then claw
and grab
and snatch my way to the...

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Chroí awoke early the next morning, disoriented and a bit frightened.  This was not her bed .  It was so big.  She was tired and felt drained.  Closing her eyes, thoughts...

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Woke up this morning
 on the wrong side of the tracks.
Left out leaving for all the right reasons
 and all the wrong facts.

Caught a ride with a traveling preacher
 in a beat up van.
Said he...

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...and the Demon spoke,
its voice deep and mellow like smooth satiny chocolate,
"There is more, much more than good and evil,"
the words thunderously whispered.
The verdant emerald green of the forest quivering at the sound,
drawing in upon...

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We have gone to the Kruger Park, and are now back,
All roads there are paved,
But for adventure, you can drive along very doable
Sand roads, the crocodile river runs parallel to
These sand roads and if you...

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"Photographs escort us to hidden recesses of memory and bring before us rare moments lost in time"... By Poet

Flitting through the pages of an old album,
Picked up from an abandoned dusty box, 
I saw a...

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*** How Lady Learned at Last ***

For decades, Lady daydreamed, wanting a full closet,
A packed, complete fashionable style:
Shoes to hats, to crown the French Bob
Of shinny, brunnette tresses above her hazel eyes.

There’d be gauzy blouses...

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White Dove coos the light through the bedroom window
leaving puddles of glimmering pools on the darkened floor
as the evening wanes and night takes control.
The door slowly opens and you shuffle your weary body
through the moonlit...

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Animal Chain Atrocities

No longer a bucolic photo op
bedecking a cover of Life magazine

Free grazing
pastoral images
now but bewildered enslavement

Animal commodities
factory farms and feedlots
CAFO habitats raising
sixty billion a year for dinner tables

Chickens

Hi-Tech slaughter
football fields long
alethic poor
four walled...

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One Saturday some years ago, at a market in Rokeby,
a voice was calling from behind and then caught up with me.
It was Shaun O’Malley at the rear that stopped me for a chat,
dressed in a...

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_____________________________________________________________

                              THE PRICE OF ADMISSION


So many...

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I wrap myself 
in feather-boa-fantasies of his dreams
sinuous pinot-grigio-me; 
X-rated and never sated
dancing to rock ‘n roll— 80’s dated
...my floorshow our foreplay

welcome to the conjugal jungle 
of not-so-rusted lust
sixty-something-shapely...
25th anniversary groom croons naughty thoughts;
“you could...

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The trail was long and very dusty
great clouds churned up by hooves
of the vast herd being wrangled on
300 more miles of eating their dust

Bandana's tightly wrapped round faces
cries of "get up there" ringing out
bawling calves...

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1 Samuel 5:8-  part seven God's judgment upon the Philistines and Dagon, their
false god, for their oppression of Israel continued.

So they moved the ark of the God of Israel.  But after they had...

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1 Samuel 6:9-21  continued

But if it does not, then we will know that it was not his hand us that it happened to us
by chance."
So they did this.  They took two such cows...

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To the person, they call, frigid, Translation of Paul Verlaine’s poem : A celle que l’on dit froide

(Poem written on September 5, 1889 at Aix-les-Bains, which I found a bit jarring with abrupt exclamations and...

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For the last time they all wanted to meet
him to share their thoughts, feelings; he heard them
patiently and bid good-bye to each.
Asked them to leave, as he desired to stay lone;
They left except two associates...

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T’was dry the spring with thunderstorms that rumbled across dry;
most every day was under sun or star filled sky,
the grass had burnt off early; hay mowed this year was scarce,
closed paddocks saved the milkers where...

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There’s this bison ranch in west Nebraska,
not all that far away from the Pine Ridge,
most of the time they make money off meat,
though when the weather gets colder than a fridge

they like to offer folks...

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Dressed in my shaggy brown coat
I stand nearly six feet
at my shoulders
and weigh almost a ton
My brethren and I 
once roamed the prairies
in herds of millions
grazing on its grass
which fed and nourished us
for tens of...

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From the kitchen sink at the window sill,
I see a house on the distant hill,
when as a child I had time to kill,
where now my spirit wanders still.
Then life changed on a day that’s dire,
we...

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‘Twas way back in them days 
when the ranch owner’s ways
was just about the only law there was around

Rancher’s money was king
and gun violence reigned
till marshal Ben Miller made his way into town

Well that town...

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