A cold skeleton spans the Llano.
Steel ribs crisscross through saffron vapor.
Tinged with the remains of a lost day's fire,
The crescent is a tender cradle
Should Venus slip and fall.
Llano
Category: Poetry
It is Over My Head
The people on the first floor complain about the noise overhead. Those are my feet on the floorboards of the second floor. I gripe about the music on the third throbbing through my plastered ceiling. The vertical lamentations continue, I am certain, all the way … Continue reading It is Over My Head
4 in the Morning
I have no faith in Love
Love is capricious, Love comes and goes as it pleases
4 in the morning, in the lobby, pressing 2B
Begging to come in from the cold
Inside Love grows bored, and restless we step out
Love enjoys attention. Love is thirsty
At the bar I am embarrassed for both of us
Love imposes wisdom on young couples
And reads an old letter from Paul to strangers, Love is mocking
The blind apostle, ingenuous from faith,
Never opened the door at 4 in the morning.
Love stumbles. Love slurs excuses,
mumbles something I don’t understand
Love falls
On beds, on floors, on couches
At 4 in the morning
Love sleeps.
I find no peace in Love.
And the next day Love is gone.
Economy
A dry rasp of cellophane scrapes
White noises’ impenetrable wall
Where pages of the daily news snap,
pennants on the battlements
Rattling ice in a plastic cups
Silent crystal lace on the windows
Hushed voices murmur,
the secret language of ghosts
A salient protest from a babe in arms
Pierces the cyclonic fury of twin engines
heaving sub zero blue
Cleave
We tied our rafts together Touched a friendly current Our courses divide and life runs wild yet As forever branches We are never parted
Campaign
Insect song played by an ensemble of rattling wings, legs and mandibles fills the morning air, heavy with late Summer and reeking of Witch flower. A pair of lungs labor past a gully choked with Baal thorn and Scratch weed wearing a thin coat of red dust courtesy of the dirt road and its unerring spine of stiff, dry grass. Eyes burn with unrest and want. The thunder of insatiable appetites rumble inside guts. Boots thud into town. Everything is promised while the string is pulled from a sack of malignancy.
Birdwatching
is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0
Thinking of you and your mini Hubble while spying.
A heron hunts
What low tide reveals around sandbars emerging
Like slick whale humps as the Gulf recedes
From the Mississippi shoreline,
Cat Island stretches out, purring on the horizon.
Today
Tomorrow, please do not come I don’t need you Wherever you go in your idle hours To plan our joys and sorrows Linger there Today is all I want
Mother’s Day Haiku
Look at your belly
Whether hole or fleshy hill
You have a mother
Also-ran Reckless
Most wade in, ankle deep and no further.
I went crashing
Past those who ventured up to their knees, freestyle
On gall’s impulsive course
Far beyond the drowners, I gave out and rolled
On my back like a slick otter about to crack a mollusk
I searched the sky for a lodestar.
I did not recognize heaven. All the jewels were falling
One after the other
Bright, final moments.
Cold and shriveled, I slithered to bitter ground
Capitulant among prudent ankles.
John Truelove 