StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XII, No. XXXI

I scrub and polish
Each meter of these lines
Down to the syllable
And position of the consonants;
I wash the words over me,
Wet with rhythm and occasional rhyme,
Peg them to position
And whack them mercilessly
When they refuse to obey.
I, of all people, know
The virtue of editing,
Removing the clever phrase
That adds nothing to a poem,
Blotting out full stanzas
Born too openly ostentatious
That might please an academic
And earn honors and citations,
But, in the end, subvert
A poem's eloquence.

Cigarette butts thirty feet from the smoking cage,
The smell of dead burnt tobacco overwhelms
The scent of spring trees and dew-lipped grass;
The early morning stinks with last night's carcass,
A victim of the human need for a quick nicotine fix
With little concern for any subsequent long term impact
Or the possibility of concurrent collateral damage.

We would be human but we've forgot;
Caught up in a world of our own design,
The swirl of gown, the stale of bread,
We stagger along the borderline
Between consumption and consumption,
A crazy quilt of prime and experimental synapse
That has not yet settled on a configuration
Or established a review board to weed out
System enhancements that are not cost effective.

We are lousy at determining trade-offs,
Often drawn to the flash and sparkle,
The most popular target of opportunity
Rather than a long term reality
That best suits our species overall.
We choose as if we were some lower primate
Leaning out from a tree we lightly grasp
Towards some potentially luscious fruit
That hangs just out of our reach.

We fall, tooth and claw, to the forest floor
Then struggle to stand upright on the plain
As fire-eyed lions gather along the grassy knolls.

My mother, after my brother died,
Was never herself again;
The happy, fun loving woman
Became a tightly wrapped,
High strung spouse
Who my father feared
Would not survive more children
And the possibility we too would
Die before our first birthday
-- The memory of your first born
Slowly dying from Spinal Bifida
Will do that to a woman,
Make her question her religion,
Worry about the survival
Of next infant, should she have one.

That polio struck me down,
Almost killed me when I was two,
Compounded her anxiety even as
My brother grew in her womb.
By the time I was in first grade,
A hysterectomy resolved future babies,
Sent her tumbling from her Church
And, as she aged, kept her inside
Our neighborhood except for holidays
And visits with my grand parents.
I never knew the woman who became
My mother: She was lost long before
I was old enough to understand
Who my father really loved
And what drove him to drink.

Übermensch


How many did I kill,
I bet I led the news,
I'm not just some male
Fetish sociopath, you know;
I believe in Democracy,
I believe in the Fatherland,
Death to North Africans
And their olive skinned cousins,
Norway for Norwegians
And occasional pale Englishmen,
Heil to Northern Europeans
And Christian White Fundamentalists.