Got a couple poems published today in the latest issue of Transients Magazine: https://transientsmagazine.weebly.com/issues.html. The first one is new, the second is an old one from my poetry collection Hallucinogenic Dragonfly Intermezzo, available here for only $8.95.
The Sisyphos of Bruno-Bürgel-Weg
every morning they would pass
under my window: a tall old man pushing
his quarter ton companion in a double-wide
wheelchair
the wheelbase of the chair
was too wide for it to fit on the sidewalk
they would travel on the street the cars swerving
around them honking people ogling no one
offering help it was understood
that this was the old man’s boulder back humped
eyes bulging old legs driving stopping
every fifty feet or so to catch his breath or mop
his troubled face
I didn’t know the relationship
of the two I only knew that they came from the care
home down the street and would return
at sunset passing under my window they were
the timepiece of the street the personality
and little ornament dangling from it
but then one day
they didn’t go by and that day turned into several
months and I wondered if they’d been moved
to another care home or if the fat one died
or if the old man had said to hell with his boulder
but no one I asked seemed to know the answer
and now the only memento left to remind me
of them is a green dumpster parked at the construction
site next to the care home
the dumpster is the property
of a company called SISYPHOS and in big
white letters it has that word painted
on the side of it.
Deconstruction
I’ve gotten wild with my pickaxe, trashing
everything I spent all my life building.
It’s been quite liberating,
and O so practical.
I can look in a mirror now
and see something.
I can look at a clock and see nothing
but a sad
compass of death.
The clock in me
is dead.
The hours I am living are no longer
living me.
The whole in the ecstasy
I am
is forgetfulness.
I am whole in the blood
of the grape,
and where my tragedies and weaknesses are fermented
a mysterious power
gathers.
I drain a cup
of oblivion,
slam my pickaxe into another wall.
It crumbles and out
falls
a ring.
Sketches from Berlin (& Parts Beyond) 