Summer Swelter

What is wisdom but the ramblings of a madman?

His sense left him long ago.

That much is clear.

Yet he speaks and it sounds like poetry.

Are insanity and the artist inextricably bound?

“You’re everything and you’re nothing at all.”

“Love is a martyr,” he says.

Now the Family is going green.

How progressive.

But why does he care

About a planet that hates him?

Protecting the weather for America’s youth.

Or was it Europe’s? Or the United States’?

Or are they all one and the same?

Yeah, that’s it.

It’s, like, the world, man.

The Club

I’m a member of a society

I never meant to join.

What does that say about me?

Am I a military wife now?

A stripper?

A mother?

An expat.

Am I one of them?

Or can I remain myself

Though I share their company?

The ghosts of them hover

Above my dreams.

Can I banish them?

Put them to rest?

Do I want to? Yes.

But it’s not my place.

I am one among many.

One day I will also be a shade

And I will float

Above the next. 

Postcards from Nowhere

You’ve become an abstraction

A picture

In an album

Words scrawled

On a page.

And I’ve become, what?

Prob’ly no more than a shade,

A memory of a past life,

Now miles out of reach.

An ocean does more than

Separates; it

Drowns.

Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.

I sleep alone,

With a teddy bear

And a bad back. 

Portrait Artist

I would draw you, but you’ve been drawn enough.

And I would then be one among many,

My feeble effort a footnote in the book of tribute to you.

What gift I can give

Will be drawn in the words I summon from the tip of my pen.

And even then, I will hide away my offerings

Like EBB hiding from FLOW, fearful,

Lest your genius be unmoved

By my lack thereof. 

Deadly Anagrams

I saw the gap spew forth the law of the apes.

A sea of pews and the awe of penitents cannot halt the sale.

Seven times seven is a gross violation

And we gape at our sagging edifice.

The wage of sin slew the gasping throng

As we swapped tales of plague and lapse.

The paws of the beast leapt nearer,

His claws like an awl piercing the heart.

I felt the air grow thick, a gas filling my lungs with lead.

I saw the root of a massive tree.

Now the leaves bloom black, the fruit is a stillborn husk,

And the bark: sewn skin.

They find me on the edge of a yawn.

They grasp at my mind

In the moments before I am unconscious.

I never suspect how deep the roots grow.

An ancient adversary, a primeval list.

I recognize them too late and my pleas fall on deaf ears.

My soul has been sapped.

I write my repentance but the pages are blank.