I don't want to waste your time.
Waste, baste, taste.  Lick the *** clean, clean, bean, dream whoops bad rhyme.

I don't want you to read me
so closely.  Read, bead, seed.
I rhyme to know I am alive.

Like a bee buzzes, dances on
flowers, makes honey, bunny, sunny, money.

Don't try me out until you have tasted me, peanut butter and jelly on white bread, toasted me.
Bananas like Elvis.  Home schooled and everything, ping, fling, ding.  I love you.  

I don't want to sing, ring, bing,
ting.  Call me.  I will tell you
the truth.  

You don't love me really, dilly, silly way to rhyme your time

away.

Caroline Shank

I seem to be broken now.
Pieces fall as strangled
shapes to the floor.  
I toe them, looking
for the edges to rustle
back together.

Fragments fall.
Dried edges and shriveled
meanings.  (The torn
remains of my old age.)

I think I am broken.
My poems drift
off as blowing leaves
in a dry season.  
I rake them into
a pile.  The crackles
and snaps. The ends
of thought.

I write this to save the few
remaining poems I have.
Words fall from the
dustpan of dry letters
on a cold night.

Caroline Shank
1.20.21

Crawling up the building, blue
jeaned, backpack carrying bugs that looked like jacketed roaches reached the sills of power.  We watch as liberty is breached, as red floods the tumbled, broken
in windows.

I am stung by the chant that
passes for voices calling for
rebellion.  It is called a psalm
of ignorance and summons the
dance of termites who chew
our lives like woody pulp.

My mind cannot unsee nor
my ears unhear the shot
that killed. The shades are
unleashed.  Will we forever
crawl with the vermin of
unhinged politics?

I am deafened by the trumpets
of liberty, justice and the
conquest of infamy!
The triumph over the winds of
conquest will today lead the
Constitution again to wings of victory.

We Will embrace Truth in
the Arms of History!

Caroline Shank
1.6.21

We birth a thousand
destined broken things:

chair legs detach from their seats under  
the weighted repetition of sitting cloth

itself threadbare from
the rubbing of muscle.

We glue together the
blue China fallen in grief.

The silver nails of the crib are
reserved for our rusty coffins.

We mend the holes
of our tattered souls.

We reattach old soap specks to new
and shape them into a bath ark.

The fallen pecans and apples are
hoarded for the sweetest pies to be.

The broken necks of pollards
make our most savory stock.

The new rug turned ***** is beaten
until dust flies like stars.

We shut the curtains in the
afternoon to cool the room.

Mothers iron, singing in their reverie,
folding neatly, stacking all on the chair.

They listen for the passing mail car
so they can mark the new catalogs

with the dreams of their families
cruising to a distant, distant  land.

Everything under our houses is just
the dust of every housecleaning before,

the joy of  parents knowing their children
will move out and be blessed

to reach their Jesus year and know
the sanctity of resurrected dust.

Lie To Me 2021

2020 leaves with the devil
whipping it on. But it's not going anywhere.  It is full of sound and fury.  

We scroll through the signs.
We think we will enter into
time's free zone. There are no
promises. Death drapes
from the sky.

Time past and time future
are only pages and lyrics
sung from one year into the next.
We will all cancel hope
by March.

I hear the witches chanting,
"By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes."


Caroline Shank


Notes:
The Four Quartets
Macbeth
Faulkner

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my star to keep.


I see from out my window all
the patterns in the sky merge
for one moment to the sound
of Angels trumpets.

Tonight is the time for kneeling
and watching as the sky turns
dark blue and gives off a light
only once at the stroke of
midnight.  A Star reserved
for you, a motion singular
and unmoving.  And with
a closed eye the Universe
sings.

Caroline Shank

No bad guy talks alone
to a Bible in a hotel room
with a gun in his hand.

“If a man commits adultery
with the wife of his neighbor both
the adulterer and the adulteress
shall surely be put to death…”

the good book says or
he thinks in a cold sweat.

That’s how he met Cynthia.
She was fearless.
That’s how she became his whole life.

He’s not humbling himself.
He’s not learning.
He’s not even listening.

It offers him words of love.
“YOU ARE NOT ENOUGH!”

“God loves you
with his whole heart.
He loves you.”

He looks up to the ceiling
and lifts the gun up.
“Can you save me?”