It's a quarter past midnight.
Begin, here, the dirge.  
The promises of love
are missing.

We danced.
A long time ago
The shuffle, the
slow, rub,
lingers.

I did not reach out
thru the abyss,
to you
on the other side.

I grow old with
briars and cattails.
The winds scream and
the last song fractures the

heart of me.


Caroline Shank
12.31.21

The get together, the
conversation like snowflakes
melts to gin. The baubles
in the cake discarded.
Laughter, like a drunken
fruitcake, soaks in 🎭 ***.

We leave our coats behind.
The owner looks on in enebriated
unbelief and goes  to bed.

It is cold and Christmas contents
scatter behind backyard bushes.
We fall on the ice to gales of
hiccup and yelps of pain.

Our outdated traditions look
out on faces, missed at the party,
***** of belongingness.

Someone said that Christ is the
reason, but the customary
exchange gleaned
in moments, is glaringly
missed and the broken
heart turns over.
The sad neglect
which is mother of
this sadness, is seen
by the enebriate a tribute
to those who laugh.
  

Caroline Shank

To live one minute the breathless
expectancy of life
on the brink of a world whirling
at you with joyous awareness,
is to know that every sunrise calls
the Imam to prayer,

and in you the the consent of
life, the Summer response,
that breathless gasp .  


Caroline Shank.  
12./15/21


Caroline Shank.  
12./15/21

I Found God

I found God in a Baptist Church
in Milwaukee.
Faith,  small hands and
scratched bibles.

Warm cookies.

The delicate and the children.
Their names in coded
words on the skin under

my arms. .

Dedicate: the
day to the great E. Perience.

There is a new Age
coming.

I smoke a cigarette.

God arrived in fancy clothes.

Women dressed, frown.
Still voices in the

Wilderness

Witness the Beloved
baptism of perfumed
sinners

I smoked for them all.
My fee for being previously

Apostate.


Caroline Shank

There was a man come wandering
by with silver heels and loudly.
It was a Sunday and he asked me
to dance.  We tangoed through
close and warm.

Then it was a Wednesday warm
to touch you and I did.
You ran in the rain like a cat.
I called but the dull thud of
my tears fell only alone.

There love stretched
taut to crumble. And the heat
of my life felt the scald and
stars were unseen..

Light hid in drains and
you were in the rain gone.
I see you wet and reach
toward me. Dreams don't

die and I wrap the night
In paper sliced so thin

you can see thru my veins
where I have travelled

And alone.


Caroline Shank

I search for
rooms
that are lighted.  
That belong to
mornings.

I have beacons.
I search all the time.

On a
pebbly day.  My feet
run away with
the thought of
tomorrow .

I travel crests
of waves. In storms
I have stones for toes.

I am salvage of an unused
life.  Minutes,
hours, seconds left over

from the lover you
were ...

I run through
cold and
hard
gull screaming thoughts

of city lights and smoky
bars and poetry

unwritten.

Caroline Shank

I go where you go.  
I am  in your pores.

I am woven into the  curls
of your red hair.  I push memories
daily through your substantial
mind.

You are host to all the

years of our exile.  I am the
itch you wake to in the
long night.

I will be with you and
when you make love to
your wife I will be beside you.
It will be the secret you can
never tell.

We are the dreams in which
we play when night comes

and the cigarette smoke twins
memory forms, ephemeral
as the love which wraps the past
into the omnipresent

We.


Caroline Shank
12.3.21