Month: August 2020

[r]Evolution

.Reading time 1 minute.

News anchors kept us from drifting
as current events tore through
the narrow straight, all bows
against the flow.

Stern headlines rippled
around sharp shallow rocks
while we prayed for the tide to turn
to keep our fears at bay.

But that ship had sailed, its story unfolded
like thunder in a bloody sunrise.
Casts delivered lines, hooks
baited, sunk deep

where color into darkness faded.
How easily the snake tread on
bit, and quickly blued the red –
the whites flashing and bellowing,

evening lightning lashing out!
Surfacing, our breath roared
into lungs drained of voice, and sea legs,
not trusting solid ground, at first betrayed.

Paper columns sheltering idols
among the valleys and peaks
we read again and again,
relearning what to believe.

***
Every truth in time turns false,
every compass as the poles stray
errors our altars, cracks expanding admit
light, enhance and warp our understanding.

Only the set morphs
from pulpit to podium to panel – the media,
paint and clay, to prose and pixel.
The expanding spectrum encourages

a different blindness,
as things seemingly transient,
like tides, ruled by constant forces

we learn to see, forget,
and are reminded.

Timely Visits

.Reading time 2 minutes.

I.

The President’s in town.

Aside from a smug crowd in the town square
wielding posterboards of witty vitriol

and their counterparts waving baby flaggies
like preschoolers playing with their wieners

a passive gloom mediates
the rest of everything.

Fermenting trash cans
drool into sidewalk cracks
in front of small businesses

open but empty.
The insurance broker bustles
behind closed doors
his windows dark with Internet.

It feels like the Saturday after
Good Friday must have felt
back when people pretended harder
to love Jesus.

Cue a windblown Walmart bag
tangled with a tumbleweed

the pickup waiting at a red light for no reason
other than not getting caught.

The pavement swelters. The outlet mall
twists and shimmers. Any moment

the motorcade will roll through
to wound its ghosts with kind words
to staple receipts to wandering holograms
trying to return something
they never meant to buy.

II.

The President’s in town.

At an empty TGI Friday’s
the waitresses packaging takeout
watch his limos slide by
like Christopher Columbus
through the Bahamas.

The bartender steps into
the security camera’s blind spot
to sneak a shot of 1800 Gold.

Next door an excavator pauses
demolition in its jaws
like a child’s claw caught in a cookie jar.

The lights turn green. Yellow ribbons
the murderer colored between
flap in the same breeze
that unfurls the half-staff flags.

III.

The President’s in town

to check Death’s pulse

to check a eulogy off his bucket list

to exercise his freedom of
teleprompter. Meanwhile

Self-awareness
(which hasn’t showered in weeks)
coughs beneath a shred of foil
so atrophied it’s brushed like dust
so deep within the big empty brain

even if its cries were heard
even if they traveled as far
as the Pharaoh’s hardened heart

who could find it to drag it out
into the light where
in all honesty
it might die?

What’s Missing

.Reading time 1 minute.

The lost glove in the road,
giving the finger
to every wheel that ran it over,
and its other, not long after
hidden under car clutter,
couldn’t decide who was better

off. In their unintentional
endeavor, the honeymooners
discover how

they hate being together.
What’s missing always ties the knot
between such seeming dissonance,
such that imagination rots
with possibilities:

lemons and sugar
crave a squeeze and stir,
the blurred world and its lens
look for an eye, and the paperclip

patiently stands by.
The waiting we all insist on
makes anxiety worthwhile
and our universal refusal

to blend in.
Our neighbors yell
at their yelling neighbors
whose dog just won’t shut up,
barking at what they know
is nothing –

that nothing
precisely what he fears.