It’s true: few deaths are kind.
The agéd pensioner,
with Dunkirk on his mind,
prays for his to occur.
His life was long and hard;
a belt still burns his back.
Inside the cancer ward
he lies upon the rack.
It’s true: few deaths are kind.
The agéd pensioner,
with Dunkirk on his mind,
prays for his to occur.
His life was long and hard;
a belt still burns his back.
Inside the cancer ward
he lies upon the rack.
What German family must have once lived here?
Built in ’32, the building’s façade
was freshly made, the face of every god
and angel brand new. Nowadays they sneer,
looking out sooty niches, ears and noses
riddled by history and acid rain.
Wort and stinkweed prosper where once roses
brushed against each crystal window pane.
117 words
The garden has been left unkempt. Now thorn
and thistle thrive, burr, bramble and stinkweed.
The path that led to tulips, once well-worn,
is overgrown with wort and crabgrass seed.
What grand and stately gardens — Egypt, Greece
and Rome, though under the same sun and clouds
they perished. When great civilizations cease
existing their bleak ruins are but shrouds.
He’ll part this world with feathers on his feet,
the ton of five & dime cement no longer heavy,
his battered brow resembling morning wheat
as sunup blesses rusty Dodge and Chevy.
And hipsters coming out saloon and church
will mark a glimmer of unworldly light
when for a second he climbs walls to perch
by Jesus, having left for good the night.
Look from the bridge down into the black waters
where, corroded, rest the sunken barges.
A riddled sapper never set the charges:
the cry of birches is a wife’s or daughter’s. (more…)
The agéd Eskimo, once “sangilak,”
the strongest of them all, prepares to die.
Today he will not shield a slanted eye,
nor starving in the evening stagger back.
Having fought a bear and years of cold,
fresh salmon never leave his fingertips,
and caribou blood never parts his lips.
And yet, he’s lost his balance and his hold.
347 words
1) Adam
He’d pray if he knew how,
but his brain at this stage
can only concentrate
on simple survival. Now
62 words
When you are an old general, you know you’re going to go anyway.
You lead for your people & for your men, whom you not only want to win, but to survive the battle & the war.
To do this you will be hated, ostracized, & sacked in the end, but you will have won the war & saved your men.
113 words
Brother,
I can still hear your voice
although decades have passed—
the baritone of a man
who is approaching fifteen.
117 words
“She learned to walk again, but never fully recovered. She was incontinent and childish.”
She had sat at the Chancellor’s feet, a rival
to Eva Braun, highborn, blue-eyed, contrary
to the reds, dykes and faggots of Bloomsbury,
armed with only Campbell’s Flowering Rifle.
Surely she’d been guilty of high treason?
(Albion is a better place today,
a heaven for the black man and the gay!)
Nevertheless, this was not the reason (more…)
107 words
I’d lift my forehead from the book and see
a flock consisting of a billion birds,
like a river in the heavens, three
miles wide, and forty miles in length. My words
never pierced the shadow they cast down.
Born more than eighty years too late, I could
not warn them of the threat of each new town,
of hunters waiting in the underwood.
For hours they were sovereigns to my eyes,
passing over Mercer County. The sun
gilded their feathers in the bloody twilight,
and when they vanished over the horizon
towards Ohio, Michigan, and the night,
what I heard were not coos, only cries.
2005
The hooded hip-hop scum
heap up the funeral pyre;
the streets of London burn,
and yet, despite the fire,