Mid-December Poetry

Discovered at the End

of Time’s Expression

There they were, exactly as Marcel saw them,

Swimming in a spiral bowl, like clowns in a circus,

each older than the other, phlegm

As they spoke, trembling hands, a caucus

Race to unconsciousness, skin blotched,

Eyes occluded, then thought: “Do they mock us

With their superannuated breath, with their wretched

Parody of health and youth?” Feeble crocus

In the filthy snow, blossom blasted bed,

Under a lightening flash, hocus-pocus

Illusion of what once they were, led

Beyond the boundaries of persuasion, hushed

In shadows of distortion, like the red

Thread of a lost horizon, and pushed

Over the cliff of death, held in suspension,

Unable or (worse) unwilling to go beyond question.

Stay Tuned for an 

Important Announcement

We wondered what  « by proxy » meant when the big

deep voice came on of J. Edgar Hoover to enlist

our aid in fighting crime, racketeers

and enemies of the state, and then Bulldog

Drummond and sirens and shots in the dark, our ears

deep under the blankets, with only a thin orange light

of the tube shining through: Only the Shadow knows,

said Lamont Cranston, sending shivers of delight

up and down our spines, and those cackles and chuckles

that blended through the darkness with Andy, Amos

and the Kingfish himself, until we forgot Sergent

Prescott of the Northwest Mounted Police, yahoo!

through the forests of an unknown northern land

and then Silver and Champion to the south, a posse of

hombres, outlaws and vigilantes clashed and then

as each fifteen minute segment closed with Ovaltine

or Carter’s Little Liver Pills, the Green

Hornet or some other crime-buster rescued

our imagination from itself, and it

was time to click the dial to off and sleep

in another realm of dreams, as only eleven-

year-old children can, unaware this

was the end of infancy, the final show,

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

would begin another era, after radio.

Already Too Soon

The Bitterness that Bites the Sky

What brings out the bitterness that bites into the sky

So that when I roll over, stare furtively through the grass,

There are shards flung about, holes near the planets, high

Over my head a shadow, not some stray dog with his ass

On my nose, or an unquiet infant, but the empty dark

Matter everyone talks of now-a-days:

Things unknown grasp me from down below,

The biomass at the ocean’s floor, more life

Than anywhere else on earth, or the ebb and flow

Of the fungal web that binds all plants, strife

And coexistence tempered, and the slow

Bemusement of swarming starlings, the heavens rife

With their mesmeric antics between cloud and tree,

Inhabiting ditches and shivering sands, like grief

Expounded, expanded and expended for a simple fee.