Category Archives: Poetry

On Immortality

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Who do you think you are?

There is no immortality.

Immortality is impossible.

Everything dies.

Writers who claim to immortality by their body of work?

Two generations tops.

But what if you’re a great writer?

Your work could last hundreds of years.

If you are truly great, a thousand years.

The culling process of time is cruel and relentless.

What about Plato, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching?

They have lasted millennia.

But nothing can be saved forever.

One day the library will burn.

There were great works, immortal works, before these were written.

Mankind has long existed

And long has it thought

And of these thoughts

We know nothing.

They are dead.

But

The ideas renew in us.

Stories are reinvented, retold

Concepts are worked out anew

The same mistakes get made

Over

And over

It is a parent’s pain

To watch a child stumble through life

It is our pain

That each generation must live a war

It is a country’s pain

To bloat, to weaken, to topple

It is a people’s pain

To forget.

In the end the sun will burn us out.

After that the universe will collapse.

And some say

A new universe will be born

And the same mistakes made over again.

 

We will all be forgotten.

We all only have one life.

We can’t even impress who we really are

On our closest friends.

An identity is transient

It changes with each emotion.

How then can a life be remembered?

How can a great work of art

No matter how perfect

No matter how true

No matter how it affects the people

Each person will read into it

What matches their feelings at the time.

One may read the same book

Two, three different times

And feel something different each time.

Nobody knows exactly what you felt when you wrote it.

No one can ever know.

You don’t even know.

Every new thought, your old thought dies.

Every new cell, your old cells die.

You want immortality?

You with the ever changeable identity

Which you deem so important?

You, who are already dead?

Frogs and Wrinkles

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I spent some time at the Ozarks this weekend. Two poems happened. 



The warm evening air
Gently carries the song
Of a hundred happy frogs
Over the water.

The people are out too,
Talking to each other on their porches.
Their voices different
But they sing the same tune.

 

And this little haiku:

 

Time presses wrinkles

Earned remnants of smiles or frowns

Thumbprint of a soul

On Damaged Friends

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There is a man

who wanders into my cube occasionally

to chat.

It’s a welcome break from office tedium.

I brighten up and smile.

He sees me brighten up and always seems shocked, then brightens up himself.

Having seen this, I brighten up some more.

I have to wonder,

Does no one else smile when he walks in?

Does he get so little affection in life

that it only takes this amount of love to throw him?

 

When I was a kid, we used to pass a boy on our rural back road

standing at a muddy, grassy bend.

Just standing.

He used to wave

and I would wave back.

“He’s retarded,” my  mom would say dismissively.

As if that made his all-inclusive friendliness less meaningful.

But she would wave as well.

I was always happy to see him.

 

There is a man who stands on his front lawn

In a derelict part of town.

Every day on the way to work I pass him by.

He waves to everyone whose face and car he recognizes.

We wave back.

Often he has more than one person on the lawn with him

sometimes sitting on his sidewalk steps

sometimes standing with their backs to him and chatting to one another.

His house seems to be a gathering place

at seven in the morning.

But I am a grown woman now

so when I pass him by

I worry about him.

 

 

 

On Ghosts

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You might call me a ghost agnostic.

One time I found a video of a ghost. It was shot in a dark room with poorly balanced lighting on the camera, you know how it goes. The footage said something like, “MOST AMAZING SUPERNATURAL FOOTAGE etc etc.” You clicked on it, and watched a murky silhouette of a ghost. It was sitting in a chair. It kind of shifted around, like it needed to get its buttcheek meat properly situated. Then it disappeared. Wow. Most amazing.  People are thrilled to the toes when they see something they can’t explain, so they don’t seem to realize what boring lives ghosts lead. All of a ghost’s angst and drama is built around wanting to move, to get out, but being trapped by their own bitterness or sense of responsibility. It’s just office life all over again.

 

Ghosts are people too.

Ghosts wear too much perfume

They smoke inside.

They enjoy a nice rocking chair.

They use the stairs

Turn on the stove

Get annoyed at closed doors.

They pace when troubled.

They trip people

And pull hair.

They make phone calls.

They battle household pets.

They drop dishes

And run loudly into furniture

And knock over lamps, they’re clumsy as shit.

Ghosts go for walks.

Use umbrellas.

They’re very stealy.

Ghosts love musical instruments

But are painfully tone deaf.

Anytime a ghost manifests and picks a wedgie

There will be an idiot with a camera

Who distributes this fascinating footage

To the awestruck, stupidstruck living.

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