the neighborhood tweaker shuffles, waits
chews his fingernails, pops pimples
on his knees outside the old man’s house
next door. On his more put together days
he puts on the makeshift fuckboy,
tries to erase the age in his face
with turned ’round baseball caps
and intentionally ripped jean shorts
wearing paper thin: thin as what ties
together any hallucination, only to fade, to die
a civilization decivilizing — burning in August
like unwatered tomato plants,
this dream dead on the vine
this alarm sounding too close to time
Category Archives: sonnet
a sonnet about bird watching in the firebox
The little brown birds bring updates
in exchange for popcorn and promises
of future employment; here we are all flying lost
searching for homeward thermals, familiar landscapes
some sign that we are, at last, following the plot
and some indication of time passing, not
one more digitally-enhanced mirage —
Dear Lord grant me a manually-wound clock
something I am responsible for doing, a making
even if it’s only to write down each unfolding
moment: a record to keep, a memory
to pass on when, at the proper moment for telling,
for a small bit of stale popcorn I can pass on my part of the story
and also – if I’m lucky – to fly away.
a sonnet on what would have been Dad’s Birthday
Today, you would have been 95
which seemed so old to me at 17 —
there are days when you’re close
growing out of my bones, an echo
of your voice in my throat, my inner ear
but only that — the remainder
of a silence after the last syllable sounds
a memory of laughter and of a father’s rebukes
that taught me: love too can be harsh
but never without heart or intention. The fuselage
of a life that dropped out of the sky
and I plant gardens around the wreckage,
drag this sadness out into the sun, to laugh and to cry
when your absence burns the air in my lungs.