Tag: blogging

Snapshot #122

The lush coleus creates a lively pattern. Let’s call this one, “I’ll Take Five Yards of That Fabric.”

Caustic Creatures

They burn, these harsh words,
Scalding souls and hearts and minds.
Cauterize the wounds!


Affection withheld,
Absence scalds the heart that’s left.
Denies gravity


Your scorched earth tactics
Only make hearts grow fonder
For an unscarred love.

Snapshot #121

Studly Doright took the day off work today so he could get in a practice round of golf before a big multi-club championship this weekend. I accompanied him around town this morning and learned something important. That’s why I call this one, “So That’s How He Shaves Strokes Off His Game!”

Calling Home

Mom weighed next to nothing as she lay dying; the hospital bed displaying the decreasing

Pounds like a stopwatch ticking off seconds. I couldn’t take my eyes off the digital

Readout, like maybe if I concentrated hard enough the numbers would reverse themselves.

One twenty seven would read one seventy two and the cancer cells would be rubbed out like

Misspelled words on a fourth grade composition. Little pink eraser dregs lingering,

To be brushed away by pudgy fingers. The marks still visible, but inconsequential. A week 

After she died I dialed her number to relay a student’s amusing comment about 

The complexity of simple machines, but realized after the third ring that I’d lost her forever.

I could not concentrate enough or erase fast enough to bring her back, to hear her voice. 

Snapshot #120

Huge blossoms usually get the spotlight, but today I wanted to give the little guy some attention. The clusters of yellow flowers on this Thryalis Glauca display the essence of the season to come.

I call this one, “Springish.”

Justice

No justice ’round here
No fairness or equity
Only exclusion


Life ain’t fair, pardner
Pull up your big girl britches
No whining allowed.


This brave new world lacks
Compassion and forgiveness
Callous survival

Snapshot #119

If I were a cabbage, I’d want to be just like this gorgeous magenta one. I call this, “What’s Next? Ornamental Onions?”

When Love Hangs Around

Impossible, she thought, that decades later the love still held. No one had ever cared for

Her this long and this well. Surprised after the first year when he still woke up beside 

Her. Didn’t he know she had so little to give in the way of affection? And yet he mined

Every modicum of goodness, prying tiny pieces and holding them beneath a magnifying

Glass until they caught fire and everyone had to acknowledge their presence. Even her.

Excoriate

Excoriate is one of those wonderful words that comes close to being onomatopoeic, at least in my mind.


One cannot say excoriate without making the harsh, almost abrasive sound reminiscent of sandpaper on wood. The word is one I find myself using often these days, more for its secondary definition than its primary; although, I can make both work in this poem.

                          EXCORIATE

Come clean, down to the brass tacks with steel wool, superfine grit sandpaper, and elbow

Grease. We hold these truths to be self evident, you elitist bastards, that ALL humans

Equally created have an irrefutable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Try as you might you cannot scrub these words from the collective memory of this country.