Life’s Little Misdirections 🥀🦋

5 Revised Poems I'm Submitting, With Punctuation!

Ricky Gervais:
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Truth is refreshing. Truth is fleeting.
We live in fantasy, dream like Hollywood,
always believing (if we mean well)
with no actions, just words,
our invisible tapestry of rhetoric
cannot tear;
if no one can find a thread to pull.

You yanked. We could feel it —
The soft underbelly of fleeting actors
holding glued costumes and hypocrisy.
We knew, here’s a man undeterred
who should fear. Undeterred,
has cojones.

Truth is out there; woven thin,
invisible to nude eyes. We believe in it,
sometimes touch. But, too fragile,
don’t handle it like you.
It cannot be grasped by the likes of us; and,
will we hear from you again?
Did you know you built a right
platform for liberals hanging?
When do the executioners come?

It’s Hollywood.
With enough time and money
they’ll write a happy ending, don
super suits.
You had a role in it.
Now, cue Tom Hanks to play you
in the lead, soon streaming on ISIS.




Alone With My Lioness

Clearing the white drive,
hymns unsung from
my pink core —
black exhaust. I hope
the last exhaled about the house cat
envious of his revered lioness,
who alone does not know
his devotion, as she lies obscured
amid tall, dried grass and stick.

The heavy blade wielded, now idle,
props beneath my weight.

From the clean drive —
songs unrevealed linger in my heavy lungs,
black with regret.
I haven't told you about her yet,
lingering about this brilliant event.
Blinds dry eyes that yearn view
a blue vault, only to see
a long street,
as the snowplow comes.




Cars And Trucks

I’m not gay in your world, but
gay enough. I am not black either; however,
black wherever I roam without you.
I am not an immigrant, but a stranger
in an even stranger land watching their cries
like infants — helpless, little babies I refused be
since I grew up, took my medicine. Gut full
of the stuff soothes what rumbles within.

If I am not right,
or left, I am wrong and alone, watching
beer-guzzling hunters haul bloody trophies
on trucks like freedom. With mud on oversized tires,
be-dazzled grilles with tow hooks pull
tiny, two-wheel drive cars from ditches
in winter blizzards. The babies drive off
with meager thanks and expressions of shame.

I go home to the goth girl; attracted
to friends who daily reject her, shaves
her head, pumps that brain with Korean anime,
K-Pop, rants about repression, plight
of LBGTQ-plus — 13-year-old professed bisexual
(still pending), with lips more prepared for metal
piercing than tender kisses of lost innocence.

Her brother: tall, brilliant, master of piano and
brass instruments, top scorer of state and ACT testing
(Math, English, Science) befouls a basement couch
in the dark. Head strapped, controller aimed
at green distraction, too tired to remember
hand in missed assignments,
tracked on PowerSchool by two doughy parents
who'll be damned one of these babies
doesn't make the grade, land on feet to struggle
with something akin to virtual reality — our foggy existence.

Then find time to wonder…politics? What's this about?
Are you trying to get me to feel something, Mr. Trump?
Fabric of an already torn nuclear family tugged —
a tapestry too thin. Must we scrap it, create another?
And just how are we supposed to do that, when babies
bury shiny cars in ditches? Will the muddy trucks come?
My sensible SUV can't save us.



Prose and Dead Men

My tiger-striped flannel and matching yellow cap,
if slid askew, would remind living family
of the old man sitting on the tailgate
of his blue Ford, sheltered amid
flocked customers and other vegetable growers.
Cracking wise in the corner parking lot
of the local farmer’s market, his hat true --
angled in the ‘locked’ position.
A habit, I suppose, from serving in military.
Nicknamed Big John, missed death as a sentry in Guam
by just one hour. Relieved of post before
another throat slit, a nameless brother in arms.

I would not learn until I was dressed like the man.
These scribbled musings in secret journals
illuminate a dark mind. Hollow words spun,
like his cap, in my corner booth for hours
at mic’ed readings where no one peruses
the printed commitments amid pregnant pauses.
My endless voice scratchings echo an arena choked,
with tears in my eyes not for him but
some liberal heart bleeding, actualize
the purpose of prose.




Camden

What's in a name? You'd think
by any other she would smell as sweet.

Burst into my world like an unplanned thing,
I had no name for her until I saw tender, frightened,
so un-in-love with the light this trembling creature
revealed unto me,
Madeline Margaret.

I was her owner; until we mutually agreed while
playing horsey, she held my fate in her tight reigns,
some unmarked day, on the living room rug, where
chafed knees began to frail.

She was my owner; rebuffing any outward thought,
steady herself, quell angst against a world much more
punitive than a father now yielding to mother, who
one day delivered, “There's been a change.”

No, she's not Madeline Margaret anymore; but,
some pierced, hooded creature trolling about (still
my plaything), buried deep within that trembling,
tender-calling, bleeding heart. Just, 'Camden' now.
I was not to be introduced.

The story will have an ending, one day. But,
who will I see staring across a restaurant scene at me,
with love? The same contempt? For the man who
released trills from a choked throat, when
she became my owner?