Saturday, June 20, 2015

Three poems from Wild Once and Captured

These three poems can be found in my book, Wild Once and Captured, which is available on-line at the Teaching for Change webstore.


Depends on who you ask

Of course,
we still believe in magic,
a science of a different sort.

And our science tells us
what we have been feeling
for longer than we care to say.

Our time,
the way we used to be,
is up.

We were the light-footed imps
who danced away from the fate
that fell on dinosaurs.

But the time of our agility,
our reverently imagined beauty,
is over. Ended.

We are the ponderous
of our end of days,
industrialized humans,

lethal consumers
at the top of the chain
as we know it.

But before we ask ourselves
how to recover our dancing feet
with dancing shoes,

we have a duty
to ask
on behalf of all our victims

if they wish for more from us,
if their dreams of us
are nightmares.


Never Can Tell

She wakes and feels this past
lurking beside her,
the ghost that will not fall behind,
pummeling, insistent.

She wakes and prays,
whoever is there to hear,
get me through this day.
I’ll not ask for more.

She wakes and dresses
her bits of scattered self,
hauling scarred pieces
to proper places, endlessly preparing.

At the door, she checks for menace
in hallways, scanning streets
for fleshy threats and phantoms,
seeking her whom she always meant to be.

Out the door,
she strides ahead
as if fearless,
limitless and ready.

She arrives feeling
unreckoned power, feeling this day
pregnant with difference, this day
ready, perhaps, for what yesterday was not.


Wild Dogs of Poets

The wild dogs of poets
speak sharps and blunts,
wish the streets
to the back alleys
of emerald cities;

some singing separately
and, alive for now,
glow in the dusky,
dreaming sky,
some scratch for pennies

where there are no such
generosities. Some kill time
as though they are flush,
and some few, the chosen, die
on the barricades, hopeful and ready.


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