100 Short Poems
Abandoned farm
The weathered barn sags inward.
The farmhouse windows are broken and the door ajar.
Scattered among the untended fruit trees dying from blight
The emptied boxes of grayed and fallen beehives with no trace
Of the busy bees that once fanned the air around them.
Curmudgeon
It's not that I mind the young women in their eye-catching clothes.
Or all the people lost in texting, their eyes focused on small screens.
All the bright new things I never foresaw have their place and purpose.
I was young once and foolish in a world brim with the new and different.
What I can't abide is feeling increasingly lost in change that never slows.
Keep Arriving
My belongings left before me.
Where will they be when I arrive?
My ticket arrives next week.
What warnings should accompany it?
My sadness travels and makes no stops.
The glorious golden future
Somehow never quite arrived.
Was always occurring someplace else
while here one dealt daily with
bad breath, late payments, heartburn, and
the detritus of dreams that disappoint.
Well enough alone
We seldom leave it.
There is always a need
to make it just a bit better.
Gregarious, those attempts all cluster
and insure that well enough is never alone.
Casanova
His colorful young life was knit together by adventures:
a famous escape from a prison, a memorable duel,
the ocean of courtesans, married women, nuns, and girls,
all the fair prey there for him to woo, convince, dupe or pay.
Then, his vigor flagging, thirty years to recall, record and revise.
The critic in his dotage
It requires too much suspension of disbelief on our part
to accept that Jack and Jill would climb a hill - for water?
What pond or well would one likely find at elevation. And would
young Jack be schlemiel enough to fall and crack his skull?
Clearly, whatever they were up to is hidden by the silly rhyme.
Repurposing
America is always ready to reimagine and reuse the glories of its past.
Hence the Thriller Villa once owned and lived in by Michael Jackson
now houses the inimitable Liberace Museum Collection that
displays his bejeweled pianos and memorable stage costumes.
So its visitors, all agog, can luxuriate in reflected American greatness.
The Walked Dog
Beyond the constraining leash and collar
it is so much more than a tugging canine compound
of muscle, bone, fur and crazily wagging tail.
The sole sovereign of its universe of scents,
it is life always ready to rocket forward fast.
Distinctions
A Wood for Sale sign beside the road in northern Maine
atop an open-sided roofed shed with three bins:
Soft Wood on the left in an ample bin, perhaps pine.
Hard Wood in the ample bin on the right, likely red maple.
And Cedar in the much narrower sweet-spot center bin.
After the big one
A worried woman holds her dog as she walks past damage.
A man slumps against a pump amid the wreckage of a gas station.
A honeymooning couple intent only on enjoying the beach who then
rode out the storm huddled in the stairway of the evacuated hotel
now wheel their luggage down the center of an empty highway.
Sliding in
It's something we all do in various ways.
Floss between the teeth for better oral hygiene.
For the athletic, into a base just before the ball.
Fingers and sundry appendages into what's its.
Best, under the sheets and into a welcome bed.
The Conversations of Matter
The many dialects of wind-assisted leaves the forest curates.
Surf and shore together constantly improvising their ancient dialogue.
The polyglot of rumbling, ticking and twanging in the built environment.
Except when fractured, the inexorable background murmur of tectonic plates.
Beneath them all, the eternal colloquy of energy and matter trading places.
January 6th, 2021, Washington, D.C.
Our choices led us there.
Vigilantes with zip ties in body armor
Conspiracy crazies with ad hoc weapons.
People cocooned in anger and grievance.
We chose to believe the lies spun for us.
Before and after
Before: Elderly Irina Fyodorovna on a drab armchair
watching TV in her apartment in Slovyansk, Ukraine
where profligate Russian artillery suddenly finds her.
After: the TV upside down, blood pooling on the floor
a relative roots in debris for a photo to put on her grave.
Desolation
A lifetime ago happiness crossed
an invisible border all unaware,
stayed too long in distant places,
lost its passport in a careless moment,
and now cannot find a way back.
A New Life Begins
In the bustling food court at a suburban mall
young Dan first spies Bea ordering Thai takeout
and his soul stirs, recognizing immediately that it
has found something worthy of a lifelong obsession,
as if awakening from long centuries of purgatory.