A Cargo of Green Hearts
~POEMS~
I awake to a racket at 3am bandits
by another name two orphaned coons climbing the kitchen window screen protest in ratchety voices but don’t budge when I tap the glass so I open the sash and peer into their partymask faces. "What is it you want in this human world?" Five blocks away, behind Lowe’s Building Supply in the green by the Merrimack the homeless of Concord have built cabins from pilfered lumber complete with lawn ornaments a ceramic frog, a garden gnome gesturing "this way." The river flows by and so the highway, the shoppers in and out with bags of nails. In Luke, Jesus said Should someone ask for your coat, don’t withhold your shirt as well; in the Jataka Sattva Buddha throws his body from a cliff to feed a starving lioness. What did you expect from this life? says a voice room for everyone to breathe? Imagine what can be done with three nails with the blood and flesh of the bone. The coons don’t understand but I do. It is not the sound of our own starving that will wake us--if we are destined to wake at all. I wonder what I will do with the night when all the crickets have died and the zeros come to roost their crystalline holes all over the wind stripped trees. the crickets, who anchor the night to the reasonable hours and keep it from spreading all over everything the way it does in November, the month when razor blades sharpen themselves and the dead won't stop dying. I eye the guitar in the corner that promised to teach me magic words but that was April. time does not wait and I am beginning to suspect the postman of keeping all the love letters for himself and the mice of turning the hands of the clock ahead just a bit. |
Poetry LogPoems are posted here when I'm ready to share them. I often don't title my poems. The date you see above the poem may be the date it was posted here and not necessarily the date it was created. To see more, click on the Archives below. Archives
January 2020
CategoriesUnless otherwise noted, all content ©Paul-William Gagnon, Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs license.
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