Long Unsmiling Poems

"A dressed day has disrobed into the depth of a drawer's nightstand." 

(Oh, how positively awesome that what can be sorted out in such an explanatory pattern that a difference would maketh a day.)

The muskiness...

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I am sad
and need reassurance
this choice was not bad
at the time of searching
Home's new-found voice,
and is not bad
now,
and will not be bad
and sad
in my shortening future.

Diminishing now
into year by year forecasts,
no longer this seventh decade
by...

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It was unseasonably
warm for Winter
sun shone bright
cool breeze blowing
but not even cold
and I was
just walking
along, not knowing
the world, as we knew it
was about to come apart
Then that piercing scream
ripped through my heart
heart pounding and
pumping, feet
pounding,...

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Lisa and I had been watching some boys strut about, as they played soccer, in their little shorts, in the freezing cold. It’s an old animal story.

The game ended, or it was intermission and about...

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Sappho Translations XIII by Michael R. Burch

In these translations the fragment numbers are mostly Lobel-Page. All translations are by Michael R. Burch and should be so credited if they are used in any way, shape...

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Heart Of Stone

What a heart wrenching piece of news..
In today’s spread of daily news…
Boldly headlined ‘Mom: No Forgiveness”
It was about filial hurt and devastated dreams.  

This news worthy piece of news was rather brief..
The...

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THE CRYING WILD CREATURES.
Nzongi Mwero.
Oh, we recall the bygone times,
The days of the golden past,
That chirping with our merry mates,
Flying around the parks,
Gone the joys of the nests,
That freedom restrained,
Coming at our will in parks,
But...

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Gold! Gold! Dassel screamed: he had found gold! And so what we were told, he stuffed his pockets and told the fellas to pull him up.They had straddled a well rig used to clean shallow...

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Virility Imperiled Manhood Emasculated (mine)

No sense of accomplishment prevails to date
analogous to kudzu... inadequacy runs rampant
recurring theme extant within poetic endeavors,
and often discussed with assigned therapist (one
among many girls named Stephanie Dodds) do
GOOGLE search and...

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Through tinted glass, I see cars have lined up outside, like a java-thirsty snake who waits to strike at the employee working the drive-through window.
I take a last dreg of coffee, then vacate the table...

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The Fantasy of Childhood

There was a tiny house near the main house built I think to house the elderly, but ended up being a place for old furniture, bits, and bobs.
There was a loft where...

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JUSTICE

They stare out at us unsmiling
from tintypes of the first photographs,
from the tea-colored pictures 
of thin, ragged immigrants, huddled 
in cold bare rooms in tenements,
children clinging, dazed and frightened, 
their paltry belongings tied in scarves.
They...

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SMILING FOR SMART

Arrogance of your silence, stinking attitude
Rotten breath from your mouth, saliva with virus
Beauty painted in ugliness of your expression
Your niceness is enveloped by naughtiness
If you could only smile your inner beauty will shine...

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Ode To Survival

As I sit here in this still cemetery facing nomadic west,
Under these ancient oaks with deep green leaves descending,
I see the ghostly dead before me rising up as star zephyrs,
The men and women...

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I found an old photograph by the lake-   
A young woman with dark hair, gray face,              
leaning against a painted...

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Rain

Tap-tap-tap
Silence, is all I hear
While I lye here with my eyes closed
It’s a new day
Tap-tap-tap
Is what I listen to as I lay
Like a sad love song in its own way
So, my thought collaborate on a...

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A deserted old house stood off the county road a little way.
To keep apace of living I rushed by it almost every day.
For years I'd wanted to visit there to see what secrets it held,
And...

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At the local Walmart (some of us shop there)
a young woman was standing at the self-checkout 
with a huge cart of groceries, sobbing her eyes
out.  The store was crowded.  No one
paid her any...

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My scaled lips have a story, repelling
enough to well up tears in the telling.
My heart is rocked at its place of dwelling
Expect not a merry word from a face unsmiling

Toppling of troughs in the shrine...

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Here I am again, in a familiar silence
Inside a bustling place full of lies
In a bench of solitude, my preference
To watch the world as it dies
Before my senses, before my sighing eyes.

I see silence amid...

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A girl with hollow eyes 
stares from behind 
foliage rich with greens and yellows 
but she’s in black and white 
no Technicoloring here 
and the leaves are closing in 
spiraling around her face 
pulling her...

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Coronavirus

our air is fouled
so full of these deaths, and
cries of help and agony
all across the globe

there’s loud gray’s elegy, of
sun turning inducing death gray, leaving
more weeping, all weeping, for
the land is coronavirused!

and the day soured
with...

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Get me a matchstick
And the rogue over there quickly pick.
Or you fetch me smoker’s lighter,
Whose flame is assuredly brighter,
Pouring me out some petrol
From our jeep long on patrol…
Jungle Justice is beginning to itch like lust,
Last...

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In the middle of the universe I stand
Pencil and pad warming my palms 
All around pictures hang like the solar system 
And my heart fondly wants to reach far like the sun 
I let pencil...

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                        Even when she laughs, she’s sad
     ...

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