Last night, there it was. A heart in a coffee cup. We just looked at it and rubbed our eyes. For me, coffee and love have always gone together. In Tanka form…
should you find my heart
floating in your coffee cup
stir the cream gently
and then drink every last drop
until I am part of you
Not so long ago, down at the theater, we temporarily had to take down a large American flag. The man I was working with treated this job with the utmost care. I found the whole experience strangely moving. To share with friends over at the dVerse Poets Pub.
Thirteen folds
He would not permit that it touch
the ground. The Flag. Methodically,
he gave his orders, calling forth
a kind of reverence in that dusty hall.
Fold lengthwise once, twice, he said,
making sure the stars are facing out.
Then beginning at the far end from
the field of blue, take the striped corner
of the folded edge and fold a triangle
upwards to the open edge. Turn the
triangle inwards parallel to the top edge,
and make another triangle.
Keep folding triangles, carefully,
solemnly, eleven times in all,
until you reach the end and all that
shows is a perfect three-cornered hat,
a pillow of stars on a free blue sky.
We followed every instruction..
It was as if his life depended on it.
Maybe ours did too.
Remembering a local business that disappeared in the name of progress. I can’t show you a picture, because it’s gone. But here’s the general location, right next to the tracks where it sat before the new underpass went in. Written to share with friends at Poetic Bloomings and the dVerse Poets Pub.
While you wait
Before they built the underpass there was
an oil change place by the railroad crossing
on Main Street. Stuck waiting for a train?
their brazen candy-stripe sign inquired,
Have your oil changed while you wait!
and I often did, screwing up my courage
to sample their outrageously strong coffee,
thick as 10W30, hot as the devil’s arse,
while the train rattled slowly past and the
grease monkeys scampered around the bay.
One time I read a book on their table about
sibling rivalry. Another I remember staring
out the dirt-smeared window at the quietly
falling snow. I thought great thoughts there.
I decided straight-up: God loved the railroad.
But in the end not even God could help against
the wrecking ball of progress. Now I don’t wait
for trains any more. I get my oil changed in
a place with a stuffed bass on the wall.
It’s too clean. And the coffee has no soul.
The Fibonacci poetic form plays with syllables, following the mathematical “Fibonacci Sequence.” 1,1,2,3,5,8, etc. I enjoy playing with this form, sometimes letting the lines increase and then shrink back down again. Which is no excuse for what follows…
Dedicated to anyone who has ever read to an empty room and wondered “is it me?”
The Eleventh Plague
we
saw
Moses
looking smug
leaving Mount Sinai
with a sheaf of papers, shouting
My people! God has given me this brand new chapbook!
Everyone shuddered: Not again!
His poetry stank
but no one
dared tell
him
so
Penguin Poems 