Category Archives: poetry

Cassandra’s dream

Gerald.  My Gerald, my boy.

I seem to wake on this snowy night, and, my boy, my little boy, you are deeply asleep, but you float in my room.  You are a balloon boy on a string, and, bumbling against the ceiling, you drift toward my open window….why?  why? did I leave it so?

I grab onto your string….ah!  my little boy!…..but you are taken fast out into the night.

I climb out quickly,  something is tugging you away, away.  I hold fast onto your lifeline, and run stumbling out into the cold white.

A seething throng, out of the birch forest, all pale, all living death, all grasping with bony hands, all floating, has come to take you.  

They pull, they pull, they sighingly say you belong with them.

Gerald, your eyes open and you are in fear, my son.

How comes this visitation?   What have I done?

My dear dear boy.  My life.

***

Art by Michael MacRae

All in good time

Some days,

the sun seems to stare.

Like the Great Eye of Mordor.

A spotlight finding us out.

(I think, in the stupor of early dawn)

What has it seen? We wonders, yes we wonders.

“Everything under the sun”. So.

In its ever exploding light,

the very beginnings of time.

Eons. Ages. Epochs….ancestral.

Our scuttlings, squabbles, struggles, sorrows, and loves.

Who will witness its neon death?

Will they be gone before the time?

Star children of another realm.

Next stop in the infinite.

Sarah serendipity

I have seen her many times, now,
from March’s thaw to the heat of July.

She walks alone, even in a crowd.
None approach her, none jostle.
Her apparent path is always clear.
Is it by chance, dumb luck, coincidence?
Glances that wander to her
are as quickly turned away.

And she glides….to what business?

I am drawn,
and so I seek her suspected haunts.
Some days pass, then weeks.
She comes not, as if divining my intentions.

On a grey day I round the corner,
laden with grocery bags.
There, on the smokers’ bench,
this girl.

Several sparrows, a cardinal, and chickadees
flutter and settle next to her.
Long straight blondeness obscures her profile
as she studies her hands, palms up, on her tan legs.
A chickadee settles in one, and peeps.

Stunned, I stop and set down my bags.
Tongue tied, I ask if she is alright,
expecting perhaps a belligerent reply.

She turns her long head, and I see
the pools of her eyes.  Inscrutable.
There is no smile, but a gesture for me to sit.
In silence are we.
What will I say to this creature?

I ask her name.
Call me Sarah, she says, without an accent,
and the words seem to invade memory and stay.
Where do you live, I say.

She stands, tugs me upright by the hand.
The sun now comes of a sudden.
She tilts her head back, smiles finally with closed eyes.

Of a star, she says,
and I believe.

 

Salt Sea Calm

I heard that they will float you
In a sea of Epsom Salt
To ease away your tension
And things that aren’t your fault

You’re naked, with a blindfold
The water is just right
Then the doctors mention
“Do not put up a fight”.

“We’ll use you as a guinea pig
To get our readings true.
They will defy convention,
And we’ll be famous, too!”

At last you’re disconnected
From all that you can sense.
Your body’s forced attention
Is now in the past tense.

It’s only mind and ego
And the longer that you stay
You’re calmed by this invention
All troubles melt away.

picture credit to:  https://floathouse.ca/blog-archive/float-tanks-within-cognitive-science

 

 

More cat trouble

just outside my bedroom door
that little beggar waits
it’s finished all the bowls of food
and licked the empty plates

it’s pigeon-toed and cross-eyed
a ghastly sight to see
belly drags upon the floor
and a gaze that’s fixed on me

I think it has a pocket watch
(it always knows the time)
and sidles to my bedroom door
upon the stroke of nine

anticipation’s in its eye
(the left one, so I think)
the right one sends the signals out
and neither one will blink

and so I rise, attempting to
ignore its nagging yip
I walk on past, it catches up
and tries to make me trip

every day I lose the fight
the wife, she thinks it’s funny
I think I’ll help it pack its bags
and give it bus fare money

she says we can’t have company
no more, ’cause it’s no use
if someone sees it, we’ll be charged
with animal abuse.

 

 

 

Crippled

A day, smartingly bright.
Smallish trees bend under windyness-
fishing rods tugged in unison.
Weeds party in the garish garden.
The fence, once painted traffic white,
leans into dishevelment.
Through its pickets, in time lapse,
the rarity of a skipping child.
A scooter-bound granny with a head full of stories,
and, later, the pilot of a souped-up wheelchair,
doing her death wish pirouettes in the roadway
while passers-by stop and honk.
All of these, like paintings seen through a clinging veil.
Seen by the crippled inside.
One more coffee, maybe,
to feed the prurience,
the insomnia.

In a fix, in a pickle, in a stew

Captain Miller and his boys
Heard the lookout cry ahoy!
As they ran aground upon the bar of sand

And their hardy ship was broken
And their gunpowder was soakin’
And the situation soon got out of hand
When the storm had cast the crew upon this land

”Twas just a little island
But he warned them all Be silent
He was wary for the safety of his crew

So they brought what they could carry
And he told them not to tarry
And bring those guns and ammunition too
Or we’ll wind up in a pickle and a stew

Now, the natives, they were tribal
And they’d never seen the Bible
And they cared not but a fig for being kind

And they smelled the blood of others
Who were surely not their brothers
And they crept upon the crewmen from behind
With culinary motives on their mind

So they had them all surrounded
And upon their prey they bounded
They were silent, and they blended with the night

And the sailors were defeated,
Of their guns and ammo cheated,
And they couldn’t even offer up a fight
They were dragged away, before the morning light

Now, the tribal men were hungry
All they had was fruit and sundry
And the puny fish they caught within their net

And the coals, they were a-raking
Getting ready for the baking
Of the biggest catch they’d captured, as of yet
And the sailors, they were humbled with regret

Now the Chief, he started dreaming
Of the roasting and the steaming
And the savory delights they would enjoy

And the slaughter would be gruesome
And the barbeque so toothsome
A rotisserie of spits they would employ
And the sailors’ sorry ship they would destroy

Now, the Captain, he was cunning
And his mind had started running
To a way they might this tragedy undo

How to rescue all his crewmen
From these natives so inhuman
And find their guns and ammunition too
And free them from this Pickle, and this Stew.

Number 16- Shoulders in the sea

On the promontory, in the day,
Alone, I look in idleness.
Gulls circle, their cries a tapestry of the familiar.
But on this day, they swarm.  So many.
And, now, their crude symphony quiets swiftly
into a windblown silence.
Disturbed I am, in my ennui.
A smoky greyness filters all reflection.
The birds, in this cool contrast,
have the aspect and the purpose of carrion seekers.
I see, in this charcoal sea,
lapped over by choppy waves,
what surely are the twin backs of some marine enormity, not of this place.
The buzzards, still in silence,
circle ever more tightly,
but will not land.
The marine things do not move.
From the gloom,
I spy the coming storm, one of immediacy.
The carrion birds disperse, leaving the scene.
For a moment, losing my vision, I cower.
Then I see, in the charcoal sea,
not two beasts, but the shoulders of a drowned giant,
bared by the boiling billows.
As I hold fast to my rock,
the ferocious tempest turns her over,
and the dead face floats,
entangled in the green hair of the sea.

I am overcome.