A Week of Short Poems: Day 5

 

~The Art of the Daily Deaf-transaction~

[coffeehouse poem]

She cocks her head

and smiles at me

everything unsaid

in the not-to-be.

 

She calls me Hey

I call her the same,

neither troubled

for a proper name

A Week of Short Poems: Day 4

 

~We Have Come to Our Conclusions ~

 

We have come to our conclusions.

They make no fucking sense, of course;

claptrap fills a voice mumbling our heritage.

 

What heritage? you ask and I reply

What, indeed.  Who we are, who we were

we wax unsure.  Let us pray, then.  Let us fly

 

A Week of Short Poems Day 3

 

~A Lovely Young Reader at Tate Street Coffee~

 

Short hair tied up messily, clasped in back,

blue cotton jacket hanging open with

a spaghetti-strap shirt that bares her belly,

bell-bottom jeans and tennis shoes. 

Just data points to give range to the sight

of her sittingcurled into a ball, her feet

on her chair and a thicktome in her hand. 

Adorable is the word, the unselfconscious

beauty of a woman engrossed in a dream

of books, entranced by the public solitude

of attending words on a stack of paper.

 

(From time to time, she stops to check her phone

because nothing seems quite real when you're alone)

A Week of Short Poems: Day 2

 

~We Have Loved Our Petty Things~

 

a bed is just a bed, mattress and down

and steel coiled wraparound, patient in the night, the suffocation

of fabric stretched near to unweaving thread

 

then broken and burned in a late-night trash fire

behind the house two doors down, the heat that fills the dusks with

bittersmelling smoke scattered to the sky.

 

where all things probably best left unconsidered

are disposed undeciphered, for to burn a memory requires nothing beyond

the destruction of all such hardspare forms.

A Week of Short Poems: Day1

 ~Going Deaf I~

 

But:  somewhere a memory of sound

creeps down deep into the creases

between the smile or frown, wrinkling

the bleary notes of words, the conversation

lost as though the air could not contain

redact reductive commonsense wrapped

into the moments of thickthread stranded

hair tugged and worried at with crookrough

fingers, rubbing away the drowsingdrowse

that malingers in motes at the corners of eyes,

the saltylife flowing from sleepdeprive tears,

the silence not quite more than a man can bear,

the music, the echoes, the buzzing and tinny,

the sadness of too few coffeesips, or far too many,

the din of silence traced by the flex of mouths,

the drinking from green ceramic branded mugs,

the sink of words never to come round again,

the thoughts turned brackishdour, a day deferred

                for another life or just another hour.