Tag: Poem
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Red Cup Youths Know No History
In a well educated town, in a highly educated school they thought nothing of red cups turned swastika for that perfect Instagram shot. – A Nazi salute, a hearty “Heil Hitler” made it a meme that only needed little fingers under noses to stick it in the dah viewers face. – They knew the joke…
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Black as Pepto Bismol
When you’re young, desperate for fame and black you’ll play diarrhea in a Pepto Bismol commercial. Don’t do that black face, boy. – When you have Michael Jackson fame You’ll fly in a plane filled with little boys and toys. Don’t do that black face, nigga. – When you’re rich and black living the R.…
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Migrant Daughter
The picker’s daughter will not meet her husband on a tobacco farm, will not have her hands stained yellow from the recycling rain and sun, nor will serrated leaves scar her mixing nicotine into blood and bone. – She will pick and bail knowledge. She will listen and not marry seasons after her first spotting,…
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Ode to Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Politician
It’s the Trek and not the Star that keeps her moving. She is a Voyager suspended in the temporal rift of campaigning. – Inside she is Spock. Politics makes her Kirk. On committees she is all Janeway. – The world sees her as Lahura, the com officer trying to interpret and relay messages back and…
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Excavation of a Young T. Rex
The king dies with the child when the fearsome T. Rex becomes a cultivated chicken, a plush to hold when boy and family dog cower from lightning and thunder and the blows of life. – Beyond the fear is science, the dive into bones, dusty history, to determine whether this fossilized thigh was mommy’s and…
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South Beach Daze
South Beach before the hurricane was an old man in oversize shorts that dangled below his knees and protruded an obscene wangle when he walked. – A Brooklyn or Queens refugee with a scent of ovens baked in. He smelled of bagels after breakfast, Wolfie’s cheese cake in the afternoon, cholent for an observant dinner…
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Fairhope: A Poet’s Dream
Born of progress and poverty they took root in the pines along Mobile Bay shedding a beneficent light to all the world, knowing they might have a fair hope of succeeding. – They owned the land, they shared the land and everyone paid a single tax. – The poets came first, slides, tourists and Shakespeareans…
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Wildfires: California, Paradise
Nature always wanted to burn Paradise down, a swailing to its Indian, Spanish calling, a burn-off to its mandrake roots, enflamed with its third day existence, stuck between the iteration of water and light, heaven and earth, day and night, the animal hordes, the existence before the existence of man for which it sacrificed dust…
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The Parisian Chimney Sweep Knows the Night
1. They are ash. They are soot . They are silhouettes against the Paris sky. – The chimney sweeps of Paris dirty themselves into a clean extinction. – Coal, fire and wood are easy to digitalize in a fireplace generating no warmth, embers and smoke that blackens brick. 2. Jean fell off the roof and…
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The Love Stories and Tragedies of Trash
Swept up in the last row of the balcony of an old movie palace with crushed red velvet chairs: • one crumbled ticket for Gone in 60 Seconds, • a golden tub with unspoken kernels and a hole big enough for the popcorn trick, • three invisible blonde hairs from a future wife. – Thrown…
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Sharma Climbs the Stairs
The tiniest dog Won’t climb the tallest of steps Without big courage.
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Why I Hate Facebook Potato Salad Polls
Why have this poll if your husband is never going to eat your damn potato salad! I hate cheese-s cake but I adore yours. Make me this damn potato salad so I can love you even more!
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Epitaph to a Stone
Every thing has a history: a beginning and a death, everything in between is a memory, not life, just a record of its existence, an acknowledgement of its being there until it is there and there and there and way over there. – A stone is a stone until light kisses it and it becomes…
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Nun Sense
Sister Dorothea would whack my knuckles with the flat edge of a desk ruler trying to knock some nun sense into me every five times I messed up on fractions. She had that well lived-in roundness the faithful get after hard years of serving Christ in the smallest crosses of existence. From the back she…
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the rapist god
How does the world forgive a rapist god? By creating many more murdering ones until there is just one murderer proclaiming himself King of the Universe. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, Gandhi said, creating an offense to severed eyes, ears, tongues, limbs, the impaled world. Numbers move…
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Death Is Like No Movie I Have Ever Seen: The Trailers
At the Miracle my young brother saw death for the first time in a shark called Bruce, Jaws swallowing the onscreen boy on the raft in a chum wave that rippled from the light, a death that drenched every body in the shock of a nature devouring everything it sees; in an illusion real enough…
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She rise
He didn’t want her to go into triteness until he get to the other side of her memory floating away like a balloon, an ordinary thing, an ordinary word, in a world full of the weight of ordinary things. – She was floating away word by word, a balloon on a string with a heart…
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An Elegy and a Kaddish for Parkland: Activism of Blood and Parkland Sighs Seven Times
Elegy: Activism of Blood They never expected to be claimed in the activism of blood, the March for Lives, the tour across the country filling in for the senior trip for some; the pledge of voter registration for others, replacing the animal house of SATs, admission essays regulated to vague because the personal is too…
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Core Curriculum
The core curriculum downplays music, the arts, how to read and feel a poem, stresses STEM and how to zigzag to avoid a bullet, basic life survival skills. – Wouldn’t it better be for them to experience an Ode to Joy, the Magic Flute, know they share the same darkness in Hamlet’s heart, and the…
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Napalm Girl
Little did they know little Napalm Girl that while your skin seared and your cry became the shriek of war that in fiery, fiery Dresden would you find your finest burst after 50 years of dropping peace bombs. – The genuine scream of a child will change the world. – Note: A poem based on…
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Gynandromorph
The gynandromorph exists in its own perfection in the middle of the branch, the center of all birdsong— two parted whistles ending in a slow trill; the right mixing of cardinal ZZ and ZW, brother and sister; enough inheritance to be rightly hued, but not enough to be brightly sung and thus forever mute. –…
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The Love Candle
They both saw the ad for the new Valentine candle. She imagined it smelled of rose petals and chocolate. He knew it would stink of pussy and cock. True love, we all have a fragrance for that.
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Sometimes Love Can Stand No Other: The Love Story of Asim and Melati
She was everybody’s hope. He was his own. – He had been caged for 224 years, a fearsome symmetrical number, 71 free to roam the mirror forest night canopy, a tyger yearning to be a true tiger and not a Tigger, a lonely pacing streak of orange and black hungering to be proudly the last…
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I am deaf and not your simile
I am deaf not deaf, not small d death as some people like to say, but little d as in leaf, as in small l life, even though, you have to drop the l and add the d, for all of us to get and end there, although neither is usually capitalized unless it refers…
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Bloody Disgusting, Absolutely Horrifying
Every death is disgusting. Every death is not horrifying. – The odor of death makes everyone turn away and is thus disgusting to the core. – The important deaths turn the body back to the fatal beauty, the deadly stillness, – that was once the most important human thing of their life, – their death…
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My Wife Is Cooking Hot
My wife is cooking hot, a chef’s delight, a beautiful spicy confection, that nourishes me with her love every day. – I am a lousy cook, who can only follow the recipe, and improvise a dish when it comes from the oven of my heart. – So I write a poem, so she can eat…
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A bird flew out of my mouth.
“A bird flew out of my mouth”, my wife said, when I busped (half burp/half sigh), an exaltation of larks, a pause, stop, dash; a murder of crows, (probably chihuahan raven, the way my dog barked at me and questioned mark her body, maybe reading herself in the onomatopoeia of unknown syllables); a dole of…
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Death is like no movie I have ever seen: the commercials
The movie of my death has not been made but it will suck, get O stars, a thumbs down, the bad final review no one will ever see or care about, not because the life wasn’t glorious- it was- but because death robs life of glory and action, and movies are called motion pictures for…
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God Reads The NY Times and Comments
“ A preacher who doesn’t believe in God”, The NY Times headline proclaimed. – God read it, laughed and commented, “I knew that. What the Times doesn’t know – is that half of Catholic priest do it for the boys,” he said, blaspheming the church but not himself. – God turned the page looking for…
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No Good God Knows No
God is wise enough to know that there is no god. – At least in the idea of it, it seems good, even grand. – He gives extra credit for the man who thought that up, – knowing that his heart knew loss, and also knew HIM once, – seeing loss as forever negation and…
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The Donkey Braying in the Manger of the Lord or How the Jerusalem Donkey Got Its Mark
I am a prideful, stubborn, stiff-necked beast unbroken, redeemed by lamb sacrifice, who took the lash three times yet stayed unmoved, seeing the sin before the sinner until Balaam could confess to the Lord’s Angel blocking his path in that narrowing space. – Thirty-five years yon I will bear you to beyond the wide gates…
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Census of the Living and the Dead
Census of the Living and the Dead The sum total of all human existence is 108.2 billion: 100.8 billion dead. – Subtract existence from death and we are the small living, sometimes believing rest. – War dead from 150 million to 1 billion: in active conflicts that kill over 1,000. – Subtract the casualties from…
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Ice
Ice – The ice in the gully flowed over the leafs boundaries – as clear and as unconfined as light and the water it always was, – a lick for a thirsty dear if not miles away, – ice almost alone melting naturally in the sun, – until a man waking his dog on a…
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The Butterfly Effect
The Butterfly Effect – The last Monarch Will still Flap its wings Aware of the Miracle Of the butterfly effect- – Knowing that The Greatest Sentence And worst sentence Is “I am.”
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The Only Needed Wall
The Only Needed Wall The wall of my soul, rebuilt brick by brick and without a gap holds against the five assaults of idleness that falsely claims me for its kingdom. You strengthen me, Lord. Sin slips into hopelessness and the great project is completed.
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Ode to Revelation 8
Ode to Revelation 8: Another angel broke the calm of the seventh seal’s opening Bringing a censer mixed with incense and every Godly prayer The smoke drifting up a pleasing aroma to the Lord Once spent filled with a rumbling, flashing, quaking Fire hurled on the earth. – The first trumpet brought hail and fire…
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The Lord’s Palace Is Us
The Lord’s Palace Is Us The Lord establishes a palace in the hearts of those he loves. – He delivers victory into the hands of those who earnestly entreat him. – The flood that breaks out drowns the idols of the heart. – The top of poplars echo the command of the Lord And sin…
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How Jesus Wants You to Love
How Jesus Wants You to Love Love one another as if angels were in your midst. – Love what you have knowing Jesus loves all – and provides for all, even forgiving the mind’s – struggle to understand the bottomless unchanging – equality of his love and grace– A grace that strengthens – us in…
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New Bethany
New Bethany Be sworn and baptized by John on the Jordan, Jesus’ ministry Embarked, unsaintly leper Only to the Roman mean The fig tree cursed, fanes Now scourged to Na Holy oil anointing feet of a Sinless new Birth. A gift of a lady now devout Once possessed by the worst New start for a…
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Leaving Florida
The first sign of change was a house redo— Wood floors laid, countertops set, kitchen new, The first echo of Florida adieu To Tennessee Mountains that called me true. – My heart died in the heat of that summer In an oppressive puddle dried away That made bad water for a rat’s slumber And parched…
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Our Very Good Year 2002
Our Very Good Year 2002 Disney was still our home and vacation, Still a shining castle in our new life, Until the work became aggravation And forced us to refocus all our pride. – Shakespeare was a dog enjoying the sun, Catching its warm rays on the landing steps Waiting for us to return and…
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Our Seven Year Sonnet
Seven years married yet eight sonnets come In this strange arithmetic God gives more Than the eight minus one in man’s kingdom. Seven heaven is plus more in His Swore. – It is not necessary to believe in me And me to believe in you true and just, But if we are to really truly…
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The Serpent in the Manger Straw
The Serpent in the Manger Straw I spit on thee Oh Son of God and Man who tries to wash clean my dark throne. – I caused man to fall, with the bite of a simple fruit, the core decaying every soul. – Think You can save them from ME? – The world was…
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The Gift: A Poem
THE GIFT On the last day before the flight I kissed you softly, Made love to you gently. – The whole world seemed Such a fragile thing And I didn’t want it to break. – The air was crystal, the earth clay My heart was Diamonds and dust. – On the Sunday of the flight …
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Moms Save: A Poem
When Jesus won’t Moms save. When Jesus won’t Moms forgive. When Jesus won’t Moms will walk through hell For their children. When you make It to heaven, Don’t thank Jesus, Thank your mom.