Belated Words

Write On!

Tag: melancholy

  • sweet gum pods

    Thursday:

    It’s all gray against gray today.

    Gray squirrels run high, hairline limbs

    spidering from sweet gum silhouettes’

    charcoal sketch against liquid lead clouds:

    a seething sea/death gray pock-marked with

    barbed seed pods floating like mines

    in wait of gray hulled ships

    to surprise and explode to brilliant yellow.

    Even an anonymous death could brighten this day.

    Sunday:

    The moment so precious,

    yet…..called,

    I rise, with expletive, to abandon

    the sun and grackles swarm the trees

    jeering my concessions,

    shaming me,

    plopping sweet gum pod’s

    barbed, brown blessings,

    on a god’s green grass

    and my sinner’s head.

  • Going out of Living Sale!

    I’ll stick that sign at the end of the drive

    Monitoring any respond…spying through

    Cracks at the sides of shades, now drawn,

    Which, unlike my neighbors’, were raised

    Night and day in defiance of hidden lives.

     

    Must I place items neatly on slackly shelves

    Or will the sign itself be enough to summon

    What I am seeking….and what am I craving;

    A grimace, a laugh, a Jehovah’s Witness tract;

    A splintered door jamb and feet rushing in?

     

    What would adorn a shelf, entice another,

    That they would not already have, though,

    Perhaps, deny?  My truths, though clean,

    Sparkling spirals to me are likely idiocy

    To them as theirs to me.  The sign is enough.

  • an anniversary

           In front of the liquor store…

    Rain darts in jagged shots across the glass

    between weary swipes of squeaking, tired blades.

    The defroster stifles….but I leave it;

    let it fight the haze.  Maybe, it can sweat out

    this demon locked to my melancholy,

    my known genetic predisposition;

    this twinned self–tarred skin of me, entwined tight

    within and steeped in remembrance of bliss

    now forsaken.  For what….a longer life

    to be reminded of a craving want;

    of my own sad winter of discontent?

    This meninges, membranous bag for

    every muscle and bone and nerve and cell,

    every spark of thought, every common urge

    of me is immune to time’s cheap cure.

    Time is not a healer for everything.

    My eyes in the rearview beseech themselves

    and, stared down, blink a hard resolve….today,

    to pass on the easy and drive away.