Get off your ass
and tell these people
something,
anything you fool,
say the dust has collected
in the corners and
the leaves are lining the gutters
and the birds don’t care for your poetry
Say that your brain has
holes in it and cannot,
could not hold the water.
Say it, fool!
I know you want to.
Squeeze it out
of the dirty rag
and wipe
your brow with your angst
until
the birds sing again.
david michael jackson August 5, 2012
Birds notes of all colors tumble
through the foggy air
and I can’t sleep.
Flowing notes are small colored stones
cascading all through
the foggy dawn.
On the longest day of the year
I wanted to snooze
but sleep eludes.
A parliament of finches sings
a gang of robins
two cardinals drop
their cherry ripe notes into the
doppelganger fog
that magnifies
every jubilant trilling.
Rose breasted grosbeaks
calling catbirds
towhees, wrens, swallows bend their
twittering love songs
percolating
through morning air–gentle doves
mourn while blue jays
jeer rude blue notes.
Summer solstice jolts me awake-
blazons a new season on
songbird hinges.
Barbara Spring .
The Dynamic Great Lakes
The Wilderness Within
***
DOCKS
STROLLING along
By the teeming docks,
I watch the ships put out.
Black ships that heave and lunge
And move like mastodons
Arising from lethargic sleep.
The fathomed harbor
Calls them not nor dares
Them to a strain of action,
But outward, on and outward,
Sounding low-reverberating calls,
Shaggy in the half-lit distance,
They pass the pointed headland,
View the wide, far-lifting wilderness
And leap with cumulative speed
To test the challenge of the sea.
Plunging,
Doggedly onward plunging,
Into salt and mist and foam and sun.
APPENDAGE
c. Sara L. Russell
26/11/98
Did I mean to say I love you
in words or other ways?
Did we overlook each other,
through our busy working days?
Did we mean to spend more time
looking in each other’s face?
Did we mean to give each other
all of this much space?
An appendage to your life,
I filter through your days:
Fixture, lover, wife,
through your absent-minded haze
and I love you with a passion
more insane than blind
and you love me in your fashion
and you are always kind.
So I wait as days race by
with the blur you leave behind,
no time stop and try
to mutually unwind
and I love you with a passion
too intense for pride,
surviving on love’s ration
as my dreams walk by your side.
(Winner of Runners-Up Prize, Capricorn International
Love Poetry Competition, 1998)
***
What’s the use he says.
What’s the point.
Who says there
has to be a point.
A point to get stuck on?
Wasting your life is an alternative to
driving yourself into
cramped molds,
bread molds
medicine molds
molds which paychecks fit into
molds which success fits into
I have been hammered into these molds
by the pressure of the years. I lie like putty
in every intended and required shape
and yet
I still
I find this poem lying
gracefully along
the red mahogany
table
David Michael Jackson