Story

Smiles

Rituals and phony smiles

When no one feels a thing

Irritate the public if they

Aren't at once forthcoming.

Strangers, clerks and therapists

Who do not know a thing

Light ersatz candles in the dark

And think they show the way,

Go home and rest in double darkness,

Drowsiness and love.

4-22-14

Pictures

He wants to stop me hating other people.

Once I didn't. Once I loved . But now.

I keep writing poems of complaint

And retrospection. In the past enow.

Him I love. The rest I don't forget -

Like seldom blooms that hang the briars.

Did they survive unchanged? Are they the same,

Unfaded photos in my memory?
Though these flowers beckon to the sky,

They do only what they once did before.

4-23-14

Story

I wrote a poem. And its fragile ashes

Swirl inside a breeze. And angels catch them

And make them one again, and give the whole

To a god that doesn't want to read them,

And lays them on a shelf with other books.

God is not a reader. Art is dead,

And so corrupted with absurdity

That any eager mountebank today

With a pen or brush can fool the foolish.

Put them in la Scala for a year,

Then remove them and remove the artists.

Without a head, a rose has only thorns.

4-23-14

Aunt Gail

Aunt Gail is dead, the best of all my kin,

Bright and well. Aunt Mary was insane,

So we had a good and odd rapport.

I've never been to any funeral,

Not my grandpa's, not for anyone.

But when my sister told me Gail was dead,

Something like a soul flew from my body,

I knew at last that somebody had died.

4-23-14