Esmerelda
She slammed
into the rainbow with her car,
stabbed the pot of gold until it
bled yellow.
And as for the
dream, it never stood a chance.
She slept with poisons in her
head
and every
phantom man and woman took their dose.
Even the tiniest of
hopes were crunched like ants
beneath the
heel of her fascist shoe.
Smiles were boarded up. Eyes
abandoned.
Every day, she
battled the kiss, the hug, the tender look,
the cruelty of
loving couples.
The Man Waiting for Someone in the Park
If only he
were chained to a rock
and not in a park somewhere,
cold
and bitter and dying for a cigarette.
If just for an hour or
two,
he could be stretched on a rack,
or hog-tied, naked
from the waist up,
whipped and flailed until his back
runs
creeks of crimson.
But he's waiting for someone,
muttering
why don't they show.
Why are there no more
pillories,
scaffolds, cat-o-nine tails?
A stoning would be
just the thing
to pelt the hours away.
Oh tie me to a
horse
and drag me half a mile
down a rough rocky trail,
he
implores the chickadee,
the rabbit scurrying for its
brush.
Martyrdom's a dying art, he concludes.
Then he looks
again to his watch
but its hands are too thin
to be razors
and the time it bottles
is a poison slower than life.
The Question of My Survival
The cube is no
wilderness
and the computer screen
can conjure up the
image
of a Minnesota forest at dawn
but doesn't know it
from
a sale at Walmart,
so it's up to me to remember
deer
nibbling, fox trotting,
bobcat slinking silently
between the
grass and light.
This office is
the engine
so they tell me, though
I prefer the brain with
its heart
somewhere devouring the
dank water fruits with
moose,
or crawling from a groundhog's hole
or high in an old
oak
jack-hammering woodpecker holes.
A guy thinks
he's making a living
but the real living is elsewhere.
I see
a black bear, head bent,
sipping at the stream,
follow a
wolverine track,
watch fishers cavort in splashy shallows.
One
paycheck comes.
It's never enough.
Another soars with the
hawk,
romps with the swallows.
I lie on my back
on the
soft, giving, earth... pay-dirt.