Sins
anemone tentacles
on the throat of a dove,
or threads unwinding
from a beggar’s coat,
they barely bind,
hints of jail cells or guilt,
a trace that won’t sleep.
adulterous silence.
they chant, soft as dew,
patterns in clammy octaves,
when it’s dark enough,
wards of skeleton keys.
an armoire opens. who guessed?
grandparents pine there,
frowns that turn thumbscrews.
hands secretive as moths.
==========================
9/5/24 .... changed a word
Thank you for looking at the poems!
A quick note. I often edit a piece quite a bit after it goes up. The more-or-less final version, the one that settles in, arrives after a few days of the initial posting. (It's almost fair to say that a true 'final version' is like the Holy Grail and not likely to ever materialize).
Admittedly, this is a feeble strategy. I use it simply because it gets me to edit faster and more attentively than if the poems were merely tucked away in a folder.
The big downside is that readers who visit right after a work goes up are often met with a less-than-stellar version. For this I apologize. Again, my only excuse, albeit feeble, is the quirkiness of my own craft.
If you have comments or suggestions, or potential topics you'd like to see, you can email me:
owlwholaughs@gmail.com
Fly Well in the Dark,
OWL
============
A Widow
a Widow culls
the failures of lovers,
wanton as she goes,
smiling still
from mansion to shack
to home to hearth,
every incident of bed
beleaguered.
She watches dreams
from ants to lions and
elephants who dwindle
down tusky roads,
and the ill to violent swarms
who beat on misunderstood ground,
clutching as they sink,
their sentimental lies.
almost everyone
lurches when lungs stall,
cashiering for a coffin
their chains and chores.
chirp last fermatas,
and these, the Widow thinks,
never turn to dust.
but those tethered to tombstones,
or ladderlike prayers, they go down.
those who archive lists
of what wasn’t or was--
because because because …
and so it goes
from mansion to shack to home to hearth,
incursions everywhere,
wherever cruelty lies naked.
==================================
9/7/24 ... radically altered poem ... scary poem
=======
I would prefer to use "wym" instead of the male-aligned "men." "Wym" escapes gender. But the neologism would be distractive.
===========
A Love Poem
dawns and heights,
this mansion of my throat and heart
and my breath,
this rootstock of my life,
my laughter and reflections,
every molecule and aura,
she holds them in her hands
such sextants and her fingers
are the lockpicks of my evolution
and her eyes are the healers
when her body swoops and slopes to avalanche
so agile on the mountainside of my chest.
all my tides, the fault lines of my craves and emotions,
the tenderness of my failures,
and the triumphs of my lucky strength,
those brute and airy compositions of me,
every wound, shame or stall
dissolves when i lean into her ocean of murmurs,
her fluent bed.
candles serenade, and such wooed midnights
celestial, unfathomable, irreligious, the mystery of her,
this fair hypnosis when she
melts protean into my kisses and
shivers in a rain of pleasures down down
through the sudden lack of my secrets
whispering curved spells from luscious crescents
of gentle harmonious lips.
together
on a carpet of hourglasses,
nocturne- or sun-grazed,
deep in veils or astride pinnacles,
through such seasons which sprout or sink,
by days fallen bright or aloft wept,
rough-clad, winsome or satin,
there is no lack of perch,
for she enfolds me with wings
and i her,
she
who is the sculptress of my muscles,
weaver of my moved veins,
she
who seduces as art inspired by what
could have been lost, these broken inspirations of me,
this hurt magic that i am,
it could have been forgotten, these poems, this tenor,
and yet, alongside her, in each other’s arms we play,
seamless as a theater of senses, alive
as a pulse of actors within scenes of motion,
moment by spell, to climax where storms behold what gleams,
and the sun enshrines what must beam brighter,
revealed by us, together, by her, by me,
to climb stairs.
=====================
10/24/25 trying ...
10/23/25 lots and lots of mods ... a work of a lifetime that might never be (and yet, even if not, it is)
9/7/24 ... many mods..
Still Life Late
wafer
of pearl and eve
soon to fade
i see myself
in its dim depth
weak,
this glum gloss
which daubs my thoughts,
a nimbus of doubt,
this puddle of hope
dusky with an offer
of communion bread.
the color wanes
from such tender heat
when my thoughts
mimic wax
slow yet fluid
melted then caught
in its reflection.
=====================
10/13/25 eds
9/8/24 eds,
A Gamble
mousy,
brown against black,
scurrying on paws
once maple lobes,
wind its muscle,
decay its flesh.
mottle dripping off,
such brittle rot.
it rushes a busy tire,
eager to kiss,
earn an autograph,
or perhaps a speck of peace.
always so swift,
Fate obsessed with dice games,
rolling over and over,
bidding leaves to tumble
and resolve.
=================
Serviceberry and Doe
a doe in the woods
shies from an effortless signpost
of thorns.
none
of the ten thousand points scrape her.
hasteless she flows,
snaps no twig.
jags of shadblow
comb her fur
in meek quiescence.
drops of sun,
sifted by noonday birches,
accentuate when she cranes
fair.
============
Quiet Bay
azure basks in a slack breeze.
it's hard to tell reflection
from lobster boat.
water scolds skipped rocks,
successive with brief mouths.
nothing is supposed to be quick.
clouds are origami.
rocks gargoyles.
the flick of an arm
unwanted flame.
=================
At the Keyboard
fingertips. bishops and rooks primed.
diagonal. orthogonal.
hostage to a rash hopscotch,
obsessed yet servile
over sleek prim tiles.
troublesome tiles, tiles which somehow
invoke the odor of Darth Vader’s chest.
my eyes track mumbo jumbo.
ears dog a ridicule of clicks.
hours of this. hands twin crabs
doing the mountebank shuffle.
fingertips--later--
fade through a falter of clog dance.
heart yanked
as if in an Id-space-time machine:
Z's to ampersands,
drowsy then aroused.
gleeful hate and fear and sex.
commas are chores then look like semen.
hyphens become hymens
wasting their innocence.
'how long
can the repeated period marks last?'
my fingerprints ask to erode drip by drip.
'how much touch can i lose
on this psycho-topo-dramo-topological trip?'
whether to retreat,
exhausted yet stimulated
from this multiemotional mission,
should i
into the far simpler math
of a game of chess.
===================
10/3/24 eds.
Diagnosis
infested with warfare,
blood on your blue
and white.
we’re not sure
how to remove the bullets
sunk in your organs.
in effect, cysts.
you have canons for femurs.
sabers for ribs.
why did you embrace the Enola Gay
in the first place?
did you know
you’ve had radiation sickness
ever since?
we're putting you on a diet.
no more bingeing on prejudice.
this sclerosis of fear,
its paroxysms of hate--
they attack the heart.
and the gold that plates your veins,
quite the heaviness, you know.
it sucks up all the warmth.
we'll send a shovel, not a scalpel,
to extract the corpses.
==========
10/3/24 eds.
This is styled as an op-ed for newspaper submissions. Unfortunately, I have less than a 5% acceptance rate. Part of the reason is that the biggest newspaper in my State (Maine), the Bangor Daily News, leans Republican in its endorsements. They did take one of my pieces last year, though.
============
The Democrats Need to Do Much Better
We live in a corrupt system, and the Democrats have been a big contributor to the problem. They need to do much better. Otherwise, a redoubling of outrage will make their recent victories short-lived.
The wealth curve in our country, over the last several decades, has been like a broken lung, one that deflates the middle class and pumps up the wealthiest. Four hundred citizens now have as much wealth as 50% of Americans (about 150 million people). The mathematics of the distribution graph don't lie. It is the clear sign of a sickly nation, not a healthy capitalism.
Who has spoken up about this? Until the last election cycle, Bernie Sanders, who was not even a Democrat until recently, was the lone standout when it came to wealth inequality and obscene grift.
Consider our healthcare system. It has come to the point where a hospital is ready to fleece someone for their entire lifesavings if they dare, heaven forbid, to get sick or injured. Big pharma has no cap on pricing, unlike in other countries. Once affordable drugs, such as insulin, have skyrocketed in cost. Not long ago, the pharmaceutical industry had no qualms about flooding the country with addictive opioids to make a buck.
I won't even go into the maddening, byzantine machinations of the health insurance companies.
The Democrats have been onboard with this decades-long moral decay. They take plenty of donations from big insurance and big pharma. Jobs went overseas or to Mexico thanks to Bill Clinton as much as the GOP. Even very recently, Democrats have defended absurd tax cuts for the wealthy (such as the SALT deduction).
We have become an Alice-in-Wonderland nation. If wages increase, the stock market suffers (worries of inflation). If people lose jobs, the stock market benefits (overseas profits). With a slant worthy of Svengali, increases in the Dow Jones are seen as more vital to our country than indices that monitor the health, income and happiness of the people.
Case in point: The Dow has soared to over thirty thousand points while Americans suffer the worst phase of a pandemic.
The siege on the middle class has been so sustained, so awful, that Donald Trump, an extreme outlier, took the White House in 2016. He would not have been able to accede without tapping into outrage at how rotten our structures of governance and finance have become.
Trump is even more blatant in his corruption. But that's not the point. Large segments of the population, say the 85% who don't have sizeable investments in the stock market, have lost confidence in America. They have lost faith in our principles. Many are ready to follow a new kind of leader, one who would change everything by acting as a monarch.
We should all, in fact, despair at the decline that has taken place. We should recoil at the kleptocracy. At the sucking away of middle-class life into a grotesque distribution curve. At the obvious, brutal grift that has wrecked families and homes, and cost lives, health, and hope.
Are we now, even somewhat, that City on a Hill? The Democrats need to do much better. Heroically better. They cannot be as weak and compromised as they have been, or we will continue our worsening decline.
=======
Lily and Spider
tarweed, bindweed, shorn plots of grass,
they know nothing of the nine blossoms on the hill,
gold and purple crowns
of the mariposa lily.
they do not know
the secret name of the chalky spider
poised like a cross inside the fifth lily.
guardian pure as pearl,
a navel in a tiara,
portrayal both pentacle and christ.
this sacred vigil
mates with the corollan curves
to dance a spell, a whirl, a flourish
through the texts and bends of things.
don’t ask pesticides and ragweed to explain.
they haven’t watched ravens
soar to make love in a moebius strip;
or seen the coupled butterflies, festivals of sylphs,
twine in purple yaw to ascend in a helix.
=====================
10/3/24 eds.
"corrolan" sounds better than "corrolate"
107 in Sunland
the sun gnaws on sprinkler-fed lilies.
it pinches ants till they riot,
irascible manic flames.
crows gloom the wires,
cursing at the asphalt abacus below,
and squawking at the blur
which bakes their onyx.
seven jacaranda maidens
redeem this hell-tinged town,
drizzling soft flakes
to dust the curb ephemeral purple.
a fat owl hides
in the crook of one trunk,
skin same as bark,
face more knothole
than the gourmand it will be
when night unveils
its banquet of espionages:
a prosciutto of gophers.
a platter of voles.
=================
8/29/25 .. mods .. can't ever perfect it
6/17/25 flow mods
9/3/24 ... eds..
7/19/24 ... edits for flow and quality
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