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A VACANT VERB A vacantly vague verb sat solidly in the middle of my page of poetry. This sharp shard of glass, (from the city’s unmowed grassy lot littered with blowing white papers and plastic shopping bags) preached dominions of BE! AM! WAS! WERE! and the best one IS! Using my fist tightened as a stretched white ball, I punched this persistent and mewling thing off its self righteous pedestal into the next empty room of unawareness. The windows opened and the blowing lace curtains sang “Aida!” Sparrows flew through the room chirping gleefully. I sat breathless in my chair. COMFORT A retirement then a move to a new unfinished house in the woods a new sun a new earth with new rocks and boulders on a new land in a new state I look for my old fat black mama. She waits with arms outstretched on our front porch, i finally come home and she holds me to her breast, rocks me gently rocks me gently smooths my cut hair back from my fevered face freely kisses my cheeks and nose and forehead, says "Ahno chil' ahno chil". Oh! my mama.
Those yellow days of revealing, living a lie, a suffocating way, say goodbye. And come Hello to all alone, the grasses need mowed, the kitchen is cold.
For you, now an acquaintance entire possessed of forked and fabulous tongue, wasping a wisdom waxed mountainous high, Touch not, mine palsied poverty. Smooth not, my matted snarled hair.
“The complete incarnate implementation of our new perpetual position that A X 2 squared equals B** is now in full force. See attached memo for verification.
Total and complete compliance is mandated. This new omnipotent office policy will copiously halt the insidious retrograde balance of fewer dollars in our petty cash fund. And let
it be further decreed that
yesterday’s gypsy cashier (secretly known as “Tipsy” at the corner Cash Bar) is irrevocably fired and forever replaced
by today’s…balding and fat, benched bureaucrat.”
The dog watches the squirrel beyond the window on the stump, full cheeks chomping corn kernals. I explain to her that
yes, he has his freedom (as I draw a glass of water from the faucet) but he doesn’t have a bowlful of food in front him every afternoon at four.
She walks away wagging her tail, kindly overlooking her master’s nearsightedness.
Song of the berry song of the prickly bush.
Tomorrow from the
stoned mountain
today
a lazy slight
rush.
Our Song of Praise when i was five
In a church stuffy dry and hot. In a pink flouncy itchy dress
I sat. Trying to be good. Playing with my blue pop beads. Pink pop
beads. (they were snakes and two pop beads together was a baby snake.) And then
the Sermon--I knew how stern the moment was and I could
scarcely breathe until we stood to sing our song of praise. Then I knew the end was near and i
could go home and talk to God under the spirea bushes,
drawing pictures in the dirt.
for money every spring Saturday’s afternoon until three or until you grew too tired. I won the set. You cheerfully paid your eight dollars owed. In July, we buried you. I kept the eight dollars alone in a box in my room. Until I was forty-two and thinking of you, I purchased your posthumous present. Every morning I sip warm coffee in your presence.
SUNFLOWER in the mud wide yellow face
to the east I will sit
by you all day and more and with my
broken pink…fan the flies far far away
from your Sunday face that
graces my grey day in the
slamming
of a door.
We all cry tears through the long, dark years, watching summer suns set, sitting sad alone in
the middle of a dark vacant night. Did you
know she stood stretching on dawn’s back porch step as the deer slayer walked past, fresh young buck
swinging on his back?
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