THE ECHINATE STEMS OF ROSES

The echinate stems of the roses

The young man presents to his love:

Of what do they bespeak?

Willful heartache from submission

Begat by promises of splendor

With magnificent numbing barbs

Fetching a rush of blood

And collapse of velvet petals?

 

(from The Grandiloquent Word of the Day:  Echinate--spiny, prickly, bristling)

All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy

Triskaidekaphobia--

The hotel floor omitted--

Shining space of void

(triskaidekaphobia:  fear of the number thirteen)

AEOLUS

                                                                         

                                                                        
Without grasping whether black branches
Silhouetted against the morning sky thrust forth
With buds hidden against its grayness, I wonder,
Rather, does the gray oppress

The rattling of their fingers
Which attempt to undermine vague fog?
The coiling wind might divulge the secret of
The winning claim. The wind’s might, with a
Current of change, calls latent valor against
The strength of mystery.
It stirs hibernation, forcing it to grow
Weary. It stirs attempts of hoary laughter at
A false spring smothered. It calls forth
Rain to revive and cleanse. It calls forth
Snow to blanket more sleep.  It clears
The path for Helios in his shining chariot.
The wind, ambiguous to the eye that peers
Out the window, seizes
A revel in March.

PAYING THE DEBT

From the confines of her bed she hears

The dripping drops from the rain

That has come--

Hollow-sounding drops, echoing from the walls of the bucket,

Falling from the eave above her window,

Containing themselves in the bucket as a fluid mass, waiting,

Marking time endlessly, yet bearing up encapsulated

In the confines of the infinite moment--

A muted sound, drumming the
Certainty of the end...
And after she is lulled, stranded in the

Limbo of the dripping drops,

The bucket brims over, spilling

Its unseeded water in sheer and shining glazed cascades

Onto the ground...

Onto her nearby garden.

A death is a planting.

FORGIVEN

The tax man, ambitious was he.
Forgiven he was, yet quite wee.
We can all do as amply
As the man in the tree--
Above all, to forgive thine and thee.

An adultress was posed for her sin
As was Jesus in a ploy, but he then
Inscribed in the grime
And suggested in time
To cast stones at not what they'd been.

A leper the Teacher did heal,
The odious who'd been yet concealed.
He begged with appeal
For his censure's repeal:
His sure faith the dear Lord could feel.

A panicked, feared man was possessed
With demons that Christ did address.
The Legion of greed
Did plead to proceed
Into pigs but were drowned as their guests.

He requested we pray not in grandiose ways
For the nourishment of our bodies' long days.
He appealed for redress
Should our enemies transgress--
For release from a wicked one's sway.

 

 

TONGUE-TIED

A tongue like

Two left feet--
A mouth like
Two left thumbs--
The teacher can't
Help but talk
Like a teenager--
Like she can't
Spit out a sophisticated
Sentence in a cool group
Of adults, so she sits shyly by,
Chewing on a pencil,
But like--but give her
Hands a blank slate
And she can wield her
Way prolifically,
Yet economically,
Through diatribes
As wisely asserted declarations
Charge down her arms,
Heated by her blood,
Articulated by her fingertips,
Urbane, complex, and critically considered,
Clearing the metaphorical room of debaters--
But why would she want them
To leave?
She doesn't.

SYNTAX



 

Poets have words

Some days

But can put no good

Order to them--

Nothing pithy to say,

No revelations held,

Nothing even for therapy.

I'll just watch the leaves

shiver on emptying limbs

through the window now--

misplaced modifier aside.

Yet the day cries one word:

"Hallelujah!"

(Thank you to high school English class buddy Mike Barnes for the inspiration.  Miss Stella would be proud of our collaboration.)