Long Shoveled Poems

- 2016 -

- JANUARY -

A freezing cold evening

Where the stars shining bright

With frost blade flanks

From mouth and nose steam

In the clear silence

White untrodden snows

Nature's frozen pulse

Sleep like a little baby

One gracious moon

After the night the...

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Each year as Christmas rolls around, as I buckle under the pressure and stress of shopping for gifts for people that already  have everything, I find myself remembering that Christmas of 1954.

Dad had joined...

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Preparations for 'Luau' (LOU-ow) or a Hawaiian Party-like event, for a church Luau, would be a 'Ho'ike' (hoe-'E-kay). The hunters will tie the hind legs of whatever animal will go into an 'i'mu' (E'-moo), which...

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No one suspected or may have expected
As it was mind-boggling to even conceive
Of events to transpire that night by the fire
On a cold wintry Christmas Eve.

The Elf on the shelf was left by himself
And shenanigans...

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Autumn Leaves/Les feuilles mortes de Jacques PREVERT (1900-77) 
Translated by T. Wignesan 

(Note: As far as I can make out, this poem is at the heart of all versions of « The Autumn Leaves "...

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UNQUOTABLE QUOTES: XLVI - Tongue-Twisting Epigrams

An aborted foetus never stops growing in the mind of the aborted mother. She never tires of making more babies to nurture the memory of the aborted baby.

The Heart and...

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*Bear with the length of this poem. It is very important regarding the Palestine, Ohio Catastrophe.

One of the biggest environmental disasters has happened in Palestine, Ohio
But, the people there are left in it without adequate...

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What’s up with Santa
                               ...

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Twas a fortnight before Christmas
And my spidey senses were lit.
Knowing the bike I so wanted
Was to cost quite a bit.
Where my hope sprang eternal
But then I have to admit.
I wasn't too sure
If we were needy...

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I kneel to pray beneath an oak tree’s leaves,
where my journey began.
Broken limbs straggle over a patchy lawn,
a neglected place full of holes, 
shoveled from childhood memories.

I bow at the altar of the tall oak.
Days...

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White Cliffs of Dover now sponsored in daydreams
Reading each billboard that rusts on the sky
Checking a map though it’s for the wrong city
She sends a smile to the wink of his eye

Overhead cords hang to...

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What if we make it in time 

Took my eldest brother of heart
I was age eight
Routing me through different foster homes
I could turn to nothing other than art
Script my life to a page, my newly...

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Her Cheekbones, smooth as  pebbles 
Grasped tightly in his sexed up hand, sweating indelicately
Resembling that night the thoughts between the sheets were conceived
Weighing like soaked white carpets
Beneath flea market stands
She Is Beautiful, she is...

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He'd come west back in forty-nine,
three long years had passed since that time,
and still he mucked 'bout rivers cold,
with pan and shovel, seeking gold.

Fa away from Sutter's Mill,
he'd staked a claim below this hill,
a bit...

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.          We worked it out on paper and realized if we saved our ten cents a week allowance, 
it would take years to pay for them,...

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An excerpt from my new short story:

Contributing factors, however, are deemed as an assortment embracing negativity and were reinforcements for the young idealist. Granted to resonate by the dark lord was his underlying purpose. The...

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Life screws us all__so in 
that sense, its queer
In a white neighbourhood 
not far from here
 I once knew a boy
Jack was his name, so 
innocent but coy
To Jack life was amazing
little did he know...

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probably had their heart set on
consuming only greens,
probably thought that’d they’d
shed the pound, might’ve been a
resolution for the new year,
might’ve been a sudden love of
animals that led them to getting rid
of anything that hung in...

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My skin crawls as I watch a hand,
disembodied,
reach yet again into the Tollhouse bag.
Bright, artificial yellow. It burns my eyes.
Countless chocolate chips are shoveled down my gullet
as if crumbs to a wretched, starving creature.
I’m only...

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All alone in a bush downstream
Where not a soul was likely to dwell
Pinned against the green grasses, a young girl
Injecting her ruthlessly, a cruel hunk
At my sight, off he fled

A rape victim an innocent soul
Her...

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Snow whispered unto me
"Nothing remains static"
Yet I remained completely still
While I shoveled the snow away

Second month frozen gave way to warmth
From passion, from anger
From a wealth of confusing events
And spending it all in a volcano

Burnt...

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The undertaker at Butcher's Funeral Parlor received the dreadful call.
Seems old Senator Cheatum keeled over and succumbed at the local mall!
His untimely demise spurred the undertaker to set a series of events in motion,
To ensure...

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There is a character I had known back at the barracks,
That his doings earned him the title 'Smoke man,'
He had weird habits that always succumbed to change,
He had a way of bringing life to introductions...

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Once manifested on the 
heel of Adagio in G major,
balancés and assemblés from 
the back hand. Baryshnikov told
me to flatten my stomach, so I 
repressed the urge to
breathe; suffocation is
incandescence by the barre.

Then I looked...

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I’ve wrapped myself up in the silken tapestries 
I pulled from the breath of her dreams- 
hoping the flow of my wounds won’t sour her memory of their beauty. 
I’ve driven nails into the floor,...

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