POEM ROUNDUP FOR OCTOBER

POEM ROUNDUP FOR OCTOBER

Number of poems written: 56
Average number per day:
Longest poem: Quiet Destroyer 52.333 (46 lines)
Shortest poem: The Wait (3 lines)
Total wordcount: 5,509

Quiet Destroyer Vol. 2 3.45

That day I woke up, wakened
By my butler telling me
"They are dead. They are gone."
My parents died; killed by
Some alien power, some 'Flux'
That no one can explain.

In my dreams I was the Quick Defender,
Hero to the people, drunk on glory.
In my dreams, I did no wrong.

I told him it's all right, that
Sometimes heroes make
Mistakes; they're only human.
The voice was quiet, removed.
I loved them enough that I
Could not hate their killer.
He told me: "No, it is an alien.
A monster," and stories
Of the Harf invasion of '62
ground under his words.

I remembered those stories.
I grew up with tales of loss,
With the hate; victim
Of his fear. I am afraid
Of Flux, of the alien, of
Things I do not grok.

A hero conquers fears.
But the wise man destroys them.
In my dreams, now, I am
Quiet, conquering even death.
I Have no tears.

On Dreaming

White crows
gliding under auburn sky;
my grandfather, dressed as Pan
(Peter and the other both) flies
overhead, telling me secrets
between leathery wing beats.

Rainbow birds and foxes glitter
gliding between tree and wood
(not sameness -- in dreams, here,
the tree is building itself from bones
of the dead, and the wood is just)
speaking without wordsmithing.

We float and we burn and we speak
all the great and aweful things
we forget on waking -- words become
animals and animals become real.

And everything makes
a little more sense
than it does on waking.

Silences

Silence speaks a language all its own.
The pull to part, weighted under
The burden of the unsaid, the veil
Others place meaning into, reading
Your wishes from your body,
Saying: "If you aren't angry,
You might want to tell your face that"
Or asking what is wrong when
Nothing is that you know, only
That the silence scares them so.
Even more than the words we
Can fill it with, with also cannot
Be unsaid; at least in silence we
Cannot come undone.

The Bus Stop

Small things out of order,
A failure of certainty:
Waiting among the silent
      Wondering
      -- Did I miss it? --
      Unable
To voice the confusion
If the bus did not come.

Comfortless rain-soaked world
Huddling hunched as delay
Stretching, knowing another comes
      But
      Under it
      -- What if it, too, does not come? --
The wondering: of questions
Without answers remain questions.

Single, not a double. Not normal.
Perhaps the last bus passed that way,
Eyes skipping over; or perhaps late.

No answer is given,
No, but --
No question is asked.

They Say

They say he has a slanty way of looking at things
They say he used to graft rats with moth wings.
They tell many stories, most of which are gories,
About the things he's done and the awards he's won.
Talking abut his Findings, they whisper softly of his sins
Of bodies stacked in basements and people without skin,
Of different combinations of his terrifying equations
Scrawled upon his bed sheets and what happened to her feet
They talk about his wonders: their words are full of awe
But their smiles are the most jealous things that you ever saw
They talk of his gruesome ways and unhygenical displays
What happened to the children, that he used to be a woman
But most of all they talk in wonder they can't disguise
And try to fathom how he won the coveted Nobel Prize.

The Smell

Domesticated water
Chlorine over urine
Chemical blue.

Sometimes angled in mirrors
Under cool light
Eyes remind me --
Leprechaun green forests,
Laughter under trees;
A brace of fairies caught.

Victim

Victim of your suicide
Finding you hanging
Dangling dead from the overpass

Lost wages are musings
On underpasses, underworlds,
And my headlights finding you.

I thought you were an angel
Your body
There
For a sudden moment.

Shaken by the quake, I
Have yet to heal, do not
Know yet who to blame.

Hollow Watching

Meth addicts
speaking, dying
on video -- but
nothing happens
or feels real.

There's a music score
And many people crying
Cameramen are blurring frames
Making it a movie -- but
Nothing false can feel real.

As The Wind

One life, regimented as the wind --
Boring man plodding boring things
Until the moment
of wakening
And then drifting through night
Skies with a mind so soft and sharp.