I Hate It When I Can't Sleep April 3o, 2o16

I found this older piece that hasn't yet been posted on the blog. I lose a lot of poems, or they get lost, or they run away from home of their own accord deciding to hide in one of my flash drives.

I Hate It When I Can't Sleep

I’m wondering if there’s even

a tiny bit of shadow left in me.
The nights aren't closed-in enough,
the darkness isn’t dark enough to be called  
darkness anymore, not these  days.
Too many streetlamps guarding the corners
and the parking lot elms,
the black tar pot holes all but dried up
tormented by a lack of rain.

I should sleep, but I seldom do . . . these days.

I should do something useful, then.
Clean the house, scrub the sinks,
breakout the vacuum cleaner
listen to its small engine purr
like a cat in heat.

There’s something black-green growing

in the toilet bowl.

Tomorrow crawls inside today

and all I can say about it all
is that I gave up
caring about the solar system
the moment they denounced Pluto,
turned her into a stone, a measly rock.

Educated people are cruel.

Science even crueler
than the God they've demoted to a myth.
Heaven. Nothing more than a delusion
dreamed up by the tired working class
that longs for their suffering to end.
Woodie 4-27-14 (rewrites 4-3o-16)

The Dove April 21, 2o16

So, I'm frantically working on my annual B-day poem wondering exactly where the hell this damn thing is going. It's making no sense, it means nothing . . . and not in a good way. And then something happens. The world changes a bit . . . a bit gloomier than it was before. Not much on eulogies for the rich and famous. Figure there's enough folks in the world to do that . . . and most much better than me. But for some reason unknown to me I have decided to write something about a someone who moved on from this plain of existence. It's also going to be a part of the B-day poem I'm working on.

The Dove

I woke up to the news:

On this bright blue sky morning,

the Dove has been eaten by Crows.
On this bright blue sky morning,
a pure white cloud weeps silently.
The wind, however, rages.
It’s never subtle with its grief.

I wonder why the Crows were so eager to destroy,

to rip apart the beautiful song the Dove sang?
What’s the simplest explanation? Well, they’re Crows,
what should we’ve expected?

My ears will miss his voice for a moment or two,

but then they’ll move on even before the day is done
because there are more troubling things to worry about.

The passing of a Dove is a minor thing compared

to everything else that is going on, keeps going on,
keeps moving on, rushing down the drainpipe.

That’s how we survive.

That’s how we exist.
You must keep moving.
Woodie o4-21-16

Beat Down April o6, 2o16

Okay, so I accidently got into poetry mode, wrote quite a bit that was good enough to work on and start publishing on my blog. Politics makes us all nasty, rabid dogs towards the candidates and their supports. I hate it the most of all my friends . . . and yet . . . I'm probably the worst offender.

Beat Down

I don't understand sometimes

the laughter, the sneers,
the beat down with words.

A booted foot, a stomp                      

upon the exposed ankle,
a fist against the pointy part
of the chin paralyzes the whole body.

That I can understand.

Yet it's never enough,

the need to torture,
to poke at the dying scorpion
as the bloodied riders drift by.

It's never enough.

Nail the curtains up,  
let its own weight
slice through the skin.

Not our fault the cloth was so heavy.

We labor, we bear the weight
your words put on our shoulders,
we sing until the voice is but a whisper,
an aging echo, until that echo too fades
and finally echoes no more.
Woodie 4-o6-16