Stripped

"Anyone here?" He asks tentatively as the top of his head finally emerges from the paper stacks. Climbing upward further, he at last is able to see that his desk is made of cherry wood and doesn’t need dusting. "Hell, it shouldn’t," he thinks. "It’s been covered in paper for two weeks."

Hi ya’ll! Howya been? I appreciate the words of encouragement and the visits. I think I have finally caught up with work and recuperated from other busy-ness enough to get some really important stuff accomplished. So, of course, I am here to do that, albeit taking the easy way out with more poetry.

This Functional Life

Several sawed-off shotguns
wasting in the woodshed and suits
with dusty shoulders from hanging too long
in the closets of rusty soldiers
Maybe in church on Sunday
where real seems sometimes surreal but yet so real
that thanks should be given for bloodshed
and all the spankings behind the woodshed
because more than our shoulders are dusty

Must he
hide behind the squint and swagger
when all that is needed is a smile to sweet the bitter
swallowed with a childhood chased with annual migrations
and carpetbaggers from God-knows-where
who appear in bedrooms and kitchens
calling themselves family

Choking
from the sweetness of her love until
tears fall because of daily realizations and recognition
of mortality, of loss
because nothing lasts forever outside this room

Sitting on a sunset
smiles become vivid recollections and even pictures
will not remain – memories can’t last forever
like stale toast
Stuck
popped up in Pompeii and frozen to yesterday

~jericho~

Across the Alley

She said she loves the moments when she can forget
to be her and instead remember,
sometimes too much, sweet dreams and vistas
that other times appear
in a magazine or on television
or in someone else’s eyes.
But those moments when she loses
track of time and self, they are more than all that
because they are real
even through a window-view,
and leaning out the window is its own poison
just like suffocation.

And he said he loves the moments when he can share
his heart and soul
with another who returns them
better than they were,
with another who breathes more than air - she breathes
the soft flesh of dreams both to be and not
and is not afraid of suffocation -
and he is ready to give her his breath anyway.

They say this across the alley,
smiling across the way through windows facing
each other. Their hearts seem pinned to clothespins
sliding on the line from one to the other, like notes
or clean clothes. They sometimes see the traffic
passing by, or a little girl pushing her doll in a stroller,
or a boy riding a bike, or the mailman, but mostly at these times
they see one another,
still sometimes they see the door,
beneath its awning always lit.

~jericho~