Category Archives: social

I don’t want to be the ant

I don’t want to be the ant!
Crawling my way to and from the ant hill
Traffic snarled in little ant paths all snaked
Through the world we can’t see from our
Small ant eyes. We see only the backs
of the other ants.
We know only our objective.
Walk straight, find food, pile it on your back,
Walk straight back.

Work, and work, and work. One after another
ants working long after you are gone.
Please, no!
Let me have a will to say,
“No, I will not be the ant!”

I will be
the bird above.

Sticks and Stones

this certainly isn’t the worst day
but it is a spitting Tuesday, dark, gray,
November where the leaves have lost
themselves
and given up and died.
i see them lying in the street wet, glistening
like they’ve been crying.
i see the trees now twigs
perfectly skinny but strong,
and ripe for a hanging.

we all hurt each other daily
with slices and cuts and stabs of words.
the constant sticks and stones
that strike so regularly and steadily
it reminds me of Chinese water torture,
so much so
we don’t even notice anymore,
it’s just the background white noise that is
slowly driving us mad.

it is certainly not the worst,
it just is one of those every days
like the spitting rain,
relentless
drips.

the re-reading of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

wrote a rough rough sketch of this several years ago, just after college i guess. revised slightly here today. here’s a link to the poem, one of my all-time favorites: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

the re-reading of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

the silence after
roars like a night train
it shakes the house so
that Eliot and I
curled in our green tea
must turn twice, and again

i sense your
presence absent
who to guess that nothing
could be so heavy to move
the weight of all that air
blowing precarious

to and fro, to and fro

we leave the ones we love cause it’s easier

you never went to visit or
say goodbye.

instead you were walking alone amidst white birch
that looked silhouette black as the sun was setting
and your teeth were chattering. you were blind when you fell.

was it the memories or the premonitions that burned
your corneas and left your eye sockets full of ash?

you feel the dirt piling up under your fingernails
as you dig a place to lay to rest.

hit by a bus on Eastern Ave.

the girl snuffed ink
freshly printed and pressed from every
corner paper and fliers and stickers
on lampposts and street signs.

she stumbled Eastern in a haze
ink sinking into the grooves
of her fingerprints and pupils
and never looking
fell to her knees while her nose
smelled deep the black asphalt.

in floral housedress
an old woman watched
while one wrinkled hand
patted lightly grey hair
matted on that one same side.

on unemployment

I am the cold rain drop sliding down the window
Sliding into my chair with a defeated sigh

Looking at the phone Looking at the phone Looking at the phone

The rain drops make the asphalt jump alive the rain
Pours so hard it makes the world one large gray cloud
The rain only has one way it can go
straight down I tend to follow

Waiting on the call Waiting on the call Waiting on the call

untitled (Alan S.)

Alan, when I should have been crying about you,
I wasn’t. It was suddenly my grandmother’s funeral—
The church looked the same, that one hymn… oh I wept.
And it wasn’t that I didn’t feel the sadness of your death, Alan.
You were young and cheated. It was just
That all I heard and felt reminded me of her death.
All that surrounded me, suddenly,
Shuddered and quaked in my bones so that a flood—
Him, her, them— all those dead and gone came over me.
In that instant, I saw my friends, family,
at my funeral, and I witnessed them weeping. I realized they too
May be crying for someone else.