100 Short Poems
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.
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.
Came the Dawn
Perhaps it is the preferences of a 24/7 culture,
or the vagaries of taste in the 21st century
that made this phrase now seem so passé
- an erstwhile subtitle from the silent movies,
and, like them, now a culture fossil.