Short Tailoring Poems

Certain yarns with needles knit
Are not strong and likely will split
So please keep in mind
The seamstress is kind
And insists on try-ons for fit...

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Everytime you cry from pain
Allow my love to rain down.
Saturdays were made in honor of you;
Tailoring your wonder-filled plans,
Eyeing down the monsters then
Running like mad into my arms....

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Writhing patchwork
Vivified
With negative charge

Shirt-n-tie shoe-in
Lunch-n-punch reports
Control over who?

Crisp tailoring hides
Grisly quilt
Stitched of you

Alpha goat
Clip-clop
Over you

Alpha rat
Gnawing
On you

You...

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The Timeless and the Timely are so close and yet so far,
The former scans beyond the Earth and sees the farthest star.

The latter reads the fashions of the fleeting trends today.
Tailoring his poems, fearing what the critics say....

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A lot of sweat gives us pain.
The forest is likely to rain.
Tropical roundwood hugged in stain.
Fossil hydrocarbon and its contain.
People reject geological abstain.

In small patches, dioramas are aware.
Often, in the remote, we felt the stare.
Small-thicket Cantigi snare.
Small-scale landholders blare.
Gave us a nightmare!...

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She sat across from me
Sleeping,
Tangled in the fabric of a quiet dream
Intricately woven by her tailoring mind;
All the while peace was drawn
Across her face,
Serene and beautiful.

I sat across from her
Wishing 
That if I let the spell of sleep
Possess me,
Perhaps I will be lost within the same
Quiet dream her mind was weaving 
And join her in tranquility....

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I have stepped
into a shadow.
I am trying it on for size,

taking it in here,
letting it out there,
lifting the hem.

The task complete,
I smooth a crease,
adjust the lamp,

and flick some
leftover darkness
into a corner.


First published in Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry, Issue 35, Winter 2021.
http://www.ravennapress.com/alba/issue_35/ireland.html...

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Everything’s been said before;
The goal’s to find a way
To tailor those familiar thoughts
To fit beneath your sway.

You choose a pattern and a swatch
Of fabric that appeals,
Then cut and stitch until, at last,
Your feelings it reveals.

Along the way, you change a word
Or rearrange a phrase,
Then try it on, assessing with
A slightly biased gaze.

When done, you snip the final thread
And put it on display,
Content to know you’ve said exactly
What you meant to say.
...

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