Cornbelt residents rise with the sun,
Seeking geometry in soybeans.
Space aliens zoomed through the galaxy,
Just to crease someone’s corn flakes.
Intelligent life from distant stars
Avoids the formal radio waves.
They use advanced crop wrinkles
To converse with good ol’ Mother Earth.
Galactic wayfarers don’t stop at NASA,
They etch their figures in farrow.
A communication from outer space,
Which could be wiped away by a combine.
Two small-town farmers named Dave and Roy,
Armed with flashlights and sheets of plywood,
Chuckling quietly into their beers,
Designing an entirely new universe.
UFO investigators tote their gear,
Science-ing the folded wheat.
Either the universe is trying to talk to us,
Or the bar kicked them out too early.
To upgrade a kitchen,
Most people I know
Would hire an expert
And work with a pro.
I live in a rental,
Which limits the range
Of the choices I have
If I’m wanting a change.
So to spiff up my cabinets,
Boring and plain,
I decided that I’d go
Against the, um, grain.
For, instead of cheap plywood
Or particle board,
Some rustic aesthetic
Was what I aimed toward.
I found what I needed
And measured and cut.
The kitchen looks better
(At least to me!), but
I have to fess up
For it didn’t take much.
Contact paper provided
That cool farmhouse touch!
(“Tipi Sky”, 2007, original oil)
The older I get and longer I live here
The more I wish I were a native American,
But I was born over seas
And immigrated as a child.
My daughter however was born here
Born towards the end of winter
On the plywood floor of our mountain home,
So she can feel and rightfully say
She has Native Pride.
(11/7/25)
It seems there was no rampant fraud;
by neither was I was over-awed -
my guy’s the one who parked the bear at night.
The masses are reacting how?
The market play is plywood now
with businesses in blue states boarding tight.
It seems Iran has not attacked,
that’s not conjecture, just a fact.
That Netan yahoo’s fired a minister.
The press now has its headline dreams
with every move seen as extreme
as even garbage trucks are sinister.
The market’s poised for monster gains;
the underlying debt remains
as our collective heads are in the sand.
And yet the sun will rise today
upon the world, the USA,
and last I checked, it’s God who’s in command.
I am a softer word
softer than plywood
Whats in a name
I ask myself,
but a veneer of transposition.
an arraigned truth
From Mayday to University Hospital
from the prosaic to the nomenclature
That's the power of a word
a reason to believe
Bright fingers of crimson and gold, reaching skyward,
The flames flicker and dance as they illuminate the dark.
As we toss on another twig and some old plywood.
Now and then embers would escape with a loud spark.
Amidst the smoky scent of our cozy campfire.
Mouthwatering infusions seem to be airborne.
Familiar sensations waft into an aromatic spire.
Can it be hot buttered toast, or is that popcorn?
The fragrances so inviting, mixed with earthy sprays.
As the breeze diminishes so our campfire's warmth we feel.
The eucalyptus enhances a perfume, in a smoky haze.
The overwhelming aroma of our campfire is quite surreal.
The spellbinding flames flicker, casting shadows of their own.
Its all made more spectacular by our campfire’s cologne.
day ends in a shanty town
When crossing the bridge to the shanty town
The day was almost over, blank and tired
and due to pollution, the light on the bridge had a hue of aureate
The huts in the township were utterly miserable
consisted of bricks, stones, plywood and corrugated iron
were the roof of all the shacks
a roof that keeps out the rain but bursts your eardrums
In small spaces in the back of hovels, women were preparing the evening meals
How can people live here, washing on a line said it was possible
Children ran around playing cowboys& Indians
for them, poverty was a word that did not exist as long as they got fed.
The night came suddenly to the tune of music from a transistor radio
the night belonged to yellow cures and rats
The toy box made of plywood painted white
my grandfather built for me when I was three
has become a time machine
a tool of torture
Why haven’t I burned its contents to ash
as I did all his letters full of lies?
Within I find notebooks in which I penned
my pubescent musings that seem so silly now
First attempts at poetry
that sound trite today when read
with a much more mature tongue
that has tasted the bitter brew of experience
Scribbled quotations from history’s finest minds
Sketches of dresses I designed
A crumbling corsage of carnations
still sealed inside its plastic shell
for the last twenty five years
that he pinned to my pink Victorian taffeta gown
I can close my eyes and recall
its fresh flowery scent
feel the silky petals under my fingertips
the gentle cool early autumn breeze
blowing over the river on my young supple skin
that single night of my life
when every star in the sky
seemed to be shining solely for me
I had hope then
plywood windows dusty streets faded graffiti
Their pounded wind
called our neighborhood.
We were children
who entered their work
like a hearth.
Electric wisk, whine,
sawdusted the cool summer
uder our trees.
From banded boards
basking in dirt
to skeletal hints
at form.
Their whistles were
crisp greenery out of
trees and earth.
They tooled and straddled
their working days,
leaving their plywood,
their drywall chalk
for our pictures.
In the last light of the trees,
we robbed scrap from their
silent structure.
And they were ghosts
still working after hours.
Our tree fort,
ropes, nails chewing deeply
into bark
was worship.
A monument to them.
Published Black Buzzard Press - 1982
Trenches failing, sagging and crumpling, falling
Dad jumps down in, holding a sheet of plywood
Quick lads scramble out of a filling tombhole…
Who will save Dad, now?
(fiction)
2/28/2019
The sibilant wind blows
over frosted shingles of cracked porcelain.
Passed chain link a fissured road
wends the dry creek of my mind;
downtown the stars are charted
at a four-way stop of plywood windows,
oxidized copper's turquoise matte.
The poetry of rolled metal
wheezes mortal prose among tall weeds,
the crumbling concrete of promises.
I see it all from my window as if in trance,
a séance with the clock ticking
lifetimes of stanzas in one minute
as a For Sale sign clanks its chant on the fence.
Memory's verses were shipped ahead,
away from draped shadows
of bloodless marquees.
Sweeping remnant words
is like herding tears found in shards
of a broken tea cup.
A hiatus appeared in life's narrative,
but syllables in the tome are my amulets.
2/21/19
Where silhouetted sentinels silently stand in vain
bleeding shades of layered shame on blight-lined highways below,
their ghostly shadows remind us of dreams we dared to drain.
Interred on unkempt plots, crumbling brick carcasses maintain
evidence we’re forced to see if the trails of traffic slow
where silhouetted sentinels silently stand in vain.
Rush-hour bottlenecks, the frustrated drivers’ daily bane,
exact tolls of tribute to hollowed homes lost long ago.
Their ghostly shadows remind us of dreams we dared to drain.
Daylight, drowned in the windowless dam of a plywood pane,
begs blackness, dwelling within abandoned walls, who’ll dare go
where silhouetted sentinels silently stand in vain?
Does the doll left naked on a spray-painted stoop remain
to testify children once played under its portico?
Their ghostly shadows remind us of dreams we dared to drain.
As darkness descends, the caravans of commuters wane,
leaving deserted the injured, desolate Jericho.
Where silhouetted sentinels silently stand in vain,
their ghostly shadows remind us of dreams we dared to drain.
The words he wrote kept disappearing
Into that document that grew
The more he wrote, the more the fearing
That the longer he kept peering
The flow of them became too few
His hands kept frantically raging
Across the keyboard in attempt
To keep up with his own aging
And that knowledge was so aching
It filled him with utmost contempt
So he imagined back his childhood
And turned the words into soft sand
Sentences sand castles of feel-good
His sandbox purely made of plywood,
Pleasure returned in this dreamland.
***
N/A in SANDBOX Contest
Sponsored by Anthony Slausen,
October 7, 2016
Self Inflicted
The wounds were “self-inflicted”
unmindful of the pain
that surged within the shattered soul
a never ending rain.
The priest in sanctimonious lie
anointed, blessed, and prayed
the parish nodded knowingly
they too had been betrayed.
The charlatans of Christendom
succumbed to mourning wail
while covering for demons
who should have gone to jail.
Thus did the guilty wash their hands
lead guileless sheep to follow
the scent of incense acrid air
flickering through tallow.
Warped plywood covers tear-stained glass
the altar’s gods evicted
to suffer the never ending pain
of wounds they “self-inflicted”
1/21/2016
submitted to - Self Inflicted – Poetry Contest
sponsor – Anthony Slausen
Sub Categories
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.