Call it a wash

People were like soap operas—

So when I could,

I’d turn them to sonnets.

And when I couldn’t,

I’d call it a wash.

Cheers with my Moose Mug. Dec 2020

A three ring circus

I was mocked

Then told off

On two separate occasions

For doing what excites me

For mere entertainment

Taken, always taken

Out of sorts and out of mind

Like a three ring circus,

This tamer’s been bit

For the very, very

Very last time.

I’m not talking about Cards

If it works out

It works out

If not, you learn a lesson

You move on to the next

Split hands and

Double down

Plain clothes

Let’s make this hard demeanor

seem effortless as clothes,

worn to keep you even

keeled, careful and alone, but

we’re not an island, flower petal

rock or sinking stone,

he’ll take the time, reverse the crime

and kill me in plain clothes.

The hardest lesson

Probably the hardest lesson

to learn is that, in life

you can do everything right,

and still get it wrong.

Lost In Thought, Summer 2011

Seated in the summer sun

Seated in the summer sun

drenched in heat

reading a novel, alone

how sweet.

With memories of you

drenched in heat,

feet stretched out

along the beach.

Where in the summer sun

you’d sit and read

a novel too, my mother

sweet.

While you’d watch us kids

the swimming sea,

and how you read

effortlessly,

I never wondered then

like I do now,

how a quiet lesson

could teach me how.

I turn each page

my mind at rest,

my mother’s sun

warm on my chest.

With all stones cast

With all stones cast

There’s a pot still boiling

And a kettle left black

There’s a house still standing

With thinly cracked glass

There’s a kink in the line

With a reel still intact

There’s a spell in the ether

Waiting to be cast

With all stones thrown

There’s a hole full of flesh

There’s a crack in the arrow

There’s an angry protest

Each body a story, color, and time

Each arrow head sharpened, pristine, and divine

Each voice becomes voiceless, estranged, and unkind

With all stones turned

There lies not a soul

The truth is but squalor

Results are annulled

In a garden of daisies

Rest youthful and old

A graveyard of rubble

for silver and gold?