Short Fifths Poems

Symmetrical chords:
Same roots, thirds, augmented fifths...
(Really inversions)...

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Her life didn't unravel well
Fact:  it has been a slow hell
Sadness and disappointments
She sits and lives through much worry
Till time claims her frail shell being
Three fifths of a family
Husband high always doped
Eighty five years of fake!...

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Drink all night,
And next day,
Time tested method,
To keep fear away

Of course sanity
Goes as well,
Lucidity, oh what the hell,

Hasn't done 
That much good for me
As I suppose,
You plainly see,

Charge the trenches
Bayonnet gleams
In a field
Of horrid screams

And if you make it
To tomorrow,
All that is guaranteed,
Is lots more sorrow....

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I wish I'd never found the coroners report
Empty bottle of Valium
Empty bottle of Imiprimine
More empty bottles
Two fifths of Vodka
One empty
One still full
Garage door closed
Hose from exhaust to wing window
Wasn't I enough for him to live for
Why daddy
Why did you leave me
My heart has been breaking for 36 years
Couldn't have lived at least for me...

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Isn't it nice when the world's upside-down
   when people are crazed with-OUT Covid around

When so many dark things seem to happen
   when nuclear war can again be imagined

Yes, isn't it nice that poets lean back and peck
   at keyboards indifferent to supply bottlenecks... 

And what's going on now in Kyiv, Ukraine
   does not occupy five-fifths of their brain...

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If it's a fair game all can win.
If it's a fair game the running 
and sweating is equal
and the results can be timed.
If it's a fair game, when the clock runs down,
no miracle is asked or given, no tricks unveiled.
If it's a true game,
a zero sum invites the victor 
and consoles the loser to lockers 
and fifths of whiskey.
If it's a fair game no writing is required, 
no comma misplaced....

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An arrow
nocked by a god
and loosed
beam-straight . . .

Tick.
Tock.
The old clock
would cut it into
fifths,
fourths,
halves,
whole seconds even, and . . .
Tick.
Tock.
The old clock
told us we were part of it.

A clock marks time still,
but . . .
. . .		. . .
in silence now;
time’s become insidious
and sly
and moves on tiptoe:
close your eyes and . . .
. . .		. . .
it’s gone....

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You know me better than I know myself
You crave me while I crave our lord
With every fiber of my being
I want that moment back that moment
The holy spirit arrived within me
So divinely separated from man
My being one rib five fifths human being
Why woman only one rib of man
The rest from him his holiness
Nestled beneath my breastbone
An yet you crave me while I desire
Our lord I follow his footprints
Through the sand snow sleet and rain
While you man continue craving my pain...

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