is best. No one
has time or
inclination
for voyages
or treks. Long
wars take
a life or more
and the shortest
spat becomes
a drawn-out
divorce. We’ve
been here and there
fore and aft.
So avoid story.
Avoid conflict
and all its sticky dead.
Be slick.
Be quick.
A little poem is best.
1st published in Hot Metal
No use telling
the jellyfish
to stand up
for herself
or the footless
slug to stand
his ground.
Most amoebae
are wobbly
as curdled milk
and even
the centipede
for all his feet
doesn’t know
which one
to put down.
White feathers
quiver
the slightest breeze,
and backboneless
crabs sidle off.
So don’t expect
piling or prop.
90% of us
have been spineless
this 3.7 billion-year
epoch.
1st published in Fourth River
My mother preferred periods to semicolons.
You can’t stop smoking halfway, she said.
It’s cease or ampersand. When she found
my buts and run-ons in the attic, she burned
them
sentence by sentence in the big oil drum.
Lascivious,
she would have said, had she tried such tokes.
Ignited my father’s love letters too, logs
punctuated long before she smoldered along,
seems there was a red-haired nurse
who wouldn’t follow him to Pittsburgh.
How much does a preacher make? Not
enough,
he sighed. My mother found those epistles
in the back of his drawer, read them pilcrow
by pilcrow,
and then they disappeared. You just keep
those periods coming, she told me, dousing
my pants.
1st published in Journal of New Jersey Poets
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