Monday, January 13, 2020

poem

Decorative Chair

There’s a lone decorative chair over there
Against a wall, facing another wall;
Flanked by a non-committal table displaying 
A framed piece of objet d’art,
Faux wood etched with a scripted “Love Lives Here”.


But no one loves this chair.
No one ever sits there,
To read, to sip some tea,
To wait for someone to find their keys.
Gray-green velvety skin
Stretched taut over a thin cushion.
Armless, austere, propped on skinny mahogany pegs,
Uninviting, forlorn, don’t bother;
You’d be better off just leaning against the wall.


The back seems to lean forward
As if it were itching to spring up
And bound from this room
Like a deer disturbed in the wood.
It looks anxious over there, thwarted,
Unable to become the thing it was crafted to be.
Not really seen, it accents nothing---
Meta-being alone is thin gruel for anything.

It just wants to get out of here, ok?
Go someplace where it can be a chair.
But it’s trapped, unloved, unrewarded;
It isn't going anywhere,
Stuck in a room where nothing seems fair.

1/13/20

Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Poem

The Fence

I want to be in a story where the good guys win in the end
Where the words get smudged by tears
But you can still make out what they mean.


I like when there is a line break between paragraphs,
Wide margins down the sides of text like promenades
Where I can leisurely stroll, leave my scraps 
Of inscrutable insight for whoever reads it next.


Better yet, to remain frozen in a poem
That few will ever read
Like a fly in yellow amber
Buried in the ground
Or lost on a dusty museum shelf.
Either way, a form permanently captured.


In a poem, no one ever wins.
The good guys end up sort of bad
According to the rules of enjambment
And the bad guys just melt
Into amorphous puddles of metaphor.


Unstressed
Unstressed
Stressed


Free verse was always the doom of us.  
The delusion we could create something
Outside the boundaries of rhythm or rhyme.


This is just a blind grasping 
At the unbroken fence of time.
Prose was always just a way to imagine what was on the other side
While all these written verses are the casualties of the clutching:
The scraped knuckles, the splintered hands,


The valorous, timeless attempts 
To conjure a world without a fence.


1/1/20