StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XI

Patches of blue between the storm clouds,
You'd never guess in the interlude
That a nor' easter was coming due
On Friday night through Saturday;
Two feet or more of heavy snow
-- nobody seems to know for certain --
By the generous tits of sweet Holy Agnes,
We might be shutdown for a week!

Stay off the roads,
Be prepard to take shelter
In your home in place,
A severe winter storm,
Near blizzard conditons
Will dump enough snow,
More than ten inches,
It might take two days
Before residential streets
Will be plowed and drivable
So you can escape;
Stock up on your milk,
Your bread and toilet paper,
And everything else
You might possibly want,
God knows how you'll survive
A whole two days in your house.

If there be snow tomorrow,
Cloistering us in for still another weekend,
The world will not end,
The sun and moon will still set and rise,
And our lives will change little other than
The soreness and discomfort that will occur
After shovelling a couple feet of wet snow.
But the feeling of cyclic entrapment
Will continue to linger this winter,
Causing some to question the purposes
Of a weather god who thinks
Nothing about monopolizing
An otherwise unencumbered Saturday,
Even children soon learn
To clean up the messes they make.

We wait in wary anticipation,
Knowing the storms are coming
And there's damn little we can do about it
Except hope the weatherman's wrong again
And the snow somehow slips by us.

Ten, twenty, thirty inches or more,
A Kaiser Snowze of storms back to back
With only the briefest respite to shovel out
Between the old snow and the new snow
And god knows what's coming next weekend.

Before the storm, an unnatural calm
Has filled the early morning darkness;
At five a. m., the streets and stores are empty,
Still restocking their shelves in preparation
For the rush of half-panicked Washingtonians
Stalking the last roll of pre-storm toilet paper.

I am in the store alone with the clerks,
Buying back-up flashlights and batteries,
A handful of candles, just in case, and wondering
What clever magic fills the refrigerated shelves
With milk a full day after the storm warnings,
I can only suppose I must still be deep asleep.

Out damn snow, stop I say,
It's time for spring to come this way;
This storm grows murky and tiresome,
Following so soon after the last.
Who would have thought that such a storm
Would have so much fury within it?
Will the the street ne'er be clean,
Will these dark beds be always barren?
No more of that, no more of that,
The wet flakes pale the hopeful land;
Be gone and let bright daffodils command.

Five hours into snow it's still coming,
The heavyfall begins in a few hours at sunset,
Continuing on through morning,
Perhaps to lunchtime, perhaps beyond.
It would seem the gods have fingered us
For some special honor we do not otherwise deserve.
The next time they have the idea to reward us,
Someone tell them we would prefer
Large sums of money over any
Additional accumulation of snow.

We are waiting for Armageddon
With the media all in frenzy,
Warning us all about multi-foot snowfalls,
Sometime soon, somewhere close,
Blizzarding visibility into nothing.

Any moment, any hour, they assure us,
Furied hell is about to break loose,
The snow-filled heavens will break and open,
Not in molten fire or at the hand of a dinosaur comet,
But under a pretty deluge of crystaline snowflakes.

Lisa and Sharon
Sitting in a Tree
L  E  S  B
I  A  N

Who knows what tomorrow may bring,
This is Virginia afterall,
Queers should not be seen after sunset.

But since we can all open carry
In the lapsed State of Thomas Jefferson,
Life might become quiet interesting;
I have no intentions of not shooting back,
With a pen, of course, and not the guns
I might find aimed at my pretty head.

The men greet each other on the buses,
Compare notes on the weekend, sports scores;
The women nod to each other, sit quietly,
Reading romance novels, listening to music.
Our first day back through Pentagon Station
After the shooting, after a death;
We all pretend the world is normal,
That the last one is really the last one,
There will be no more blood on the concrete,
But we know that is unlikely:
Our best hope is that the blood is not ours.