Harvest

The bales are all raptured

in the evening, the filling room is filled.

Nicotine with alcohol

repay lonesome hours in the field.  

In life, much was imminent,

more than cancer, than Hell.

In the hayloft, cuffing a flint

lets out a spark and knell.

Crises

It hurts—the pallid confusion,

Though hackneyed, will it stop?

Who shelves the dust on the rack?

—Exfoliations of hopeful schemes

Which hid the next decadal mediocrity.

I have a dream is what I said.

When time was then, when I was me.

The Dying Home

The utmost senile twists

beguile those varicose hands.

The static on the television

appears as trees in the wind

from a black and white childhood.

Leave a pill for three o’clock

another for three-thirty.

Epigram: Servant Soldiers’ Creed

Reason in freedom we forsake,

Though we desire we should live,

Our lives are the other's to take,

Our lives are another's to give.

Haiku: The Bookend

One bookend loosened

Old tomes lean towards the cliff

To watch it plummet

Haiku/Epigram: In the End

A life well or lame

nevertheless will perish

in the end the same.

To Work

To employers I whore myself with shame,
Using all my or'fices to proclaim:
“I’ll fulfill your caprices for a fee

In total submission of liberty.”

Like the men in brothels assessing traits,

They pick in fairs the proper candidates:

Indentured servants with advanced degrees

of eager appeasement and slavery.

In forty years I’ll find the forgone dream
Of easy country life and simple means:

A frugal painter under stars that glow

And fisherman in coastal Mexico,

But now to work I go.

American Woman

American woman

One needn’t drown long to sink to your level

Shallow woman

Fools use a ruler to find the measure of a man

Little Miss. Appraisal

Must be a capitalist and the commodity

Apportioned lady

Spread wide and you’ll be thinned widespread

Transparent woman

Cannot yellow be your true color?

Confidant woman

Secrets in wrong hands are fires in dry lands

Maturing Miss. Takes

Men-don’t-pause for passions in fifty states

American woman