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

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