You are the wind.
You are the words.

Down in the hollows of
my throat you are
the songs I hum.

Your growl sounds
take me out of me.

Lay me down.
Ta dumm

Strum me.

I am the riff from
your guitar..
Play me now.  

Turn up the radio.
"It's been a long long
time."

"Play me."


Caroline Shank


Conway and Neil
and me.

I don't have anything to hold
you to me.  No picture or voice.
Do not go, but turn
if you feel the draft of your
name brush against you.
Know that it is I who sent it.  

I am a listener these days.
Listening for your voice
that called my name.

I do not publish you but
gently unscroll the days,
those summer days, so
short, when you said

forever.


Caroline Shank

My poems fall flat
like a slap on a
warm winter night.

I'm an old woman
in a dry season.
I tally the years on
prayer beads.  The
clack doesn't help.

I call out "Dr. Dr. Take
my breath away. It's
all I have left to pay
the toll."

I try and try to call
you but my hands
fail.  There is
nothing left of
me.  I lay my
crackled hands
on a picture
you might

remember.


Caroline Shank

Did you see the one about the
serial killer?  Or the making of
Die Hard?

Laying back in my chair the TV
drones on.  The world as I
know it spins out of control.

It's going to be a landscape
of empty restaurants and
breadlines.  Of bad hair
and toilet paper.

Don't feel safe in the
tribulation.  A white horse
is about to wait at your
locked gate.
.

Caroline Shank

this:  a round frame, a seascape,
no one is there.  A Sting Ray
burroughs in wet sand. Three
gulls fly low over the shore.

The oils display the sky over
the scene in shades of
blue, yellow and pink.

The wind howls across
the dunes and the seabirds
screech.  Hear them.
in the wayback. See the
sun struggle with the oils
for just a little space on
the canvas

Colors hang on a cancer
patient's hospital wall.
He sees the spread of
colors through the
morphine.  It is for
him a movement in
between the waves
where the relentless
pain remains.


Caroline Shank

Bitter robs the night
of fortune.  (Send me to thee.)
Trick of my soul's tomorrow.

Bitterness resolves at death.
(Send me to thee.)
It robs the stars of light.

I am for sweetness.
This time it will not fail
me.  

Bitter is the crepuscular
time.  (Send me to thee.)
I choose the Sunlight.

The refrain of

time's repairing.



Caroline Shank

The movements
and tides of my visceral
life endure as I am forced
forward.  

Prone to the changes
of daylight's only task,
I open to the sun as a turtle
opens to the tidepool.

The future is a wash as
it morphs from my bellied
stature. The past is
a life splayed by the nights
of your flesh. I roll with the
memory of
your voice.  

I linger on your
shore.


Caroline Shank

Would you choose to deny
me?  I can't breathe.  I am
filled with love for my family,
for God.  I am only old.
You will be too, you who
would triage my life out.

I contribute to my family.
I dig with both of the
hands God gave me in
the soil and grow beautiful
things.  I am flower fresh.

I am not broken.  No one
is broken.  You who think
you can save the life of
a younger person.  

Save Me.

I could be your mother.
Save her.  When you
make a choice remember
I was here first.  The Universe
is Random.  Tilt your
thought to  philosophy.

I have miles to go before
I sleep.  If you choose
the old ones, the infirm,
the besotted the young

Will remember you also

In

Time.


Caroline Shank


Prompt: the ethics of
triaging ventilators.

Pandemic


Time folds into itself like a
hand wraps around its own
fingers.   Minutes go into
seconds, the reverse of
times own practicality.

I waver between the worlds
of sleep and starking
wakefulness.  I move
during the disconnections
of place and action.

I will arrive, as Eliot said,
at a place of beginning.
Not to recognize my
neighbor is a conclusion
forgone as the inversion
of time depletes me.

This is sacred time
ordained by nature.
I thrive or succumb
and in the end I will
be very different.

I morph as the virus
spreads nature.
That time will end for
me is its only goal.

The pandemic is
unbleached.  I
sacrifice myself
to the gods of
unknowing.

Caroline Shank


Prompt:. Covid-19

Beware the stranger at your door.
The tissue voice of magic,
the tight handshake.

The seduction of your senses,
good words can lie.

Arrive at a place of softness,
the betrayal of surprise.

Stubborn denial, voices
enlarge the deceit.
You are not safe
when softness hides
the stone of treachery.


Caroline Shank

Afternoon


is when we made love
the first time. The only
time really.  It was the
shadow of four o'clock.

I remember your welcome
voice,  my shy
goodbye.

Every day I wait by
the window.  Your tan
coat and brown hat
disappear. You
vanish and I run
head long down
the years.

You fall from me like
grace.  Your face the
mold I make with my
hands each afternoon
at four o'clock.

In the window above
the lamppost I wait.

Everyday
the snow falls and
on my frozen
soul rests your
goodbye.


Caroline Shank
3.24.20

Prompt:. The word Afternoon.

Long ago I was born.
Generations have grown
up around me.  I am
reminded of this by
a recent escape from
depression.  

Cynara.

I have loved as well as
I have been able.  But
I am not full to the brim
of life just yet.

I offer
crepuscular years,
roses that grow
in the shade, and
warm wine at
supper.

Please forgive
the imperfection
of a soul survivor.
The choice was
made by God.


Caroline Shank
3.23.20

"I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,"

We dug with bare hands
each to the other.  Sifting
minutes into memory,
language into clover.

We spread our hands
gave life a chance and
the Universe said Yes.

We haven't changed a
minute.  We share the
telepathy of souls,
the candles of passion.

Tomorrows infinite,
reaching into each
other,

roots entwined.


Caroline Shank

Renaissance man.
You are the face of God,
of breathing. You move
currents in
our direction.  

I offer you the flower
of my country.  A flourish
saved for a hero. Be my
Cavalier.  Move
true to our time.

Renaissance man
history will move
us together if only
for the length
of a petal.

Caroline Shan

Outside my window is a globe
dropping frozen tears
that hover between the small
spaces afraid of touch.

Distanced from each
other by the sweeping of
grass on the frozen seeds
of a landscape falling from
trees.

The sky is abandoned to
fate.  We walk on tiptoe.
Today is not enjoyed.
There is no kiss.

My bird sings from her
cage, oblivious to familial
possibilities that render
me reaching for the
soap.

Snow turns to
glops on wet pavement.
We stay indoors.  Our
own globe infected with
a search for sanity.

We can only touch
thru glass.


Caroline Shank

Down the pipes it pours.
Wet, earthy smelling and
warm in July.

Keep the sounds for
me.  I hear only the
horns and slather
of the wet cars.

Rain in the buckets.
Rain in the storm
drains.  The pouring
down street lamps
glowing at night.

Rain.  The song of
Songs in the Bible
of my life.

I stand still in the
night.  Listening
for your voice
in the splash of
rain

on my face.

Caroline Shank

We are born in tide pools
and **** heaps minutes after the
Big Bang and Slow Drip.
We are remnants of some
primordial ooze.  

I have lost my tail.  
My call is
clogged with ages of
brittle shake.

I knew you before
the worlds were made.
Soldiers of misfortune,
we trip over fossils
and skree to touch
each other.  

The Flood placed a wave
between us and is the
moraine we travel daily,
barefoot and calling.

Echoes fall with a
dull thud, our lives
immemorial, our
love Jurassic.


Caroline Shank

It was not important, what you said.
It was not really the end of life
when you were leaving.  You took
all  sound with you.  But the rain.

Drenched and bone cold I
called you.

You hid in the tall bushes.  Tied as
you were to my voice you still
broke free. I was untethered
and alone.  I cried
as I left you in the dark.

You are silence leashed to my
last memory.  I was untried and
I lost.

I breathed your air.  You inhaled
me.  I told you I wouldn't hurt you.
But I killed the first fragile filaments
of touch, of kiss.  You folded like
a cloth in the night.  I ran to God
who didn't want me.

I have written poems with
the ink of time's pallette.
Colors I remember.  Did you
cry that night you left me in the
rain?  I died for three days.

You can find me, if you look,
behind time's trickster.

You don't like heartbreak poems.
I know this much.  Your impatience
defies reality.  I melt the ink
with which you scoff.  I am
not heartbroken.

I am become death.

I linger alone.

Caroline Shank

My books live on oak shelves.  They
inhabit my home. Persons of
importance stain the pages.  I take
them into my mind.
I polish even the dust.

Books have worlds waiting
always ready to unfold.
I take princes and romantic
scoundrels, heroes and villains
away to my chair.

I have a green old recliner in
the corner where books find
me. Wanting my lap.

They know the substance and
accident of my self belongs to
them.  Books are like me.
I am a mistake except
here where my books take
me to magic, to the beginning.

Ragged and torn I polish
the furniture of ink
and paper of a thousand
years or more.  

Books are the cause and
effect of my being.

I navigate the act of
reading on my green
ship.  

It is a potent
place.

Caroline Shank

That say if you stand at Michigan and State
in Chicago long enough you will
meet someone you know.
My mother always said that.

Will I meet you there?  Will you
see the eager young woman you
once knew?  You know, the brunette,
thin, full of your blue eyes looking?

I will stand there for all the years
I have left.  I will shield myself
from disappointment, having forty
five years of practice, I wait
like Penelope.  You have only
to sail your ship to my side.

You are a voyage I can't
complete alone.  Raise your
red sails.  I stand on this
corner to save the life I
once threw away.  


Caroline Shank

Relief from covid19. Jeopardy is
better now that Trebek is still
willing with us.  He wears white
wigs and speaks through chemo
sores.  What a guy to stand,
background to our greatest fears.

Women fight the public fight.
******* plop into pans.
******* skin is patched.
Men's breast tissue falls into jars.

There is no change in the drawer
for lost time.
I am not going into mammography
again.   I'm old and pain
yearly is not on my schedule.

My brother died of throat cancer
I think.  He was sick of an old
dream anyway.  Maybe it was
my mother. But I digress

Jeopardy is not relevant to
anything but it serves me well
in my aged isolation.  I'm not
sick of dying.  I am going well
into my old age, into
time future,
and into time past,
which is always now
according to Eliot.

I go into the night half clothed and
remember the words to questions
gone by.

I answer in my sleep,
and I pull my earlobe in homage.


Caroline Shank

We used to spend whole evenings
grinding on your playroom floor.
I learned from you to kiss through
clenched lips, to watch TV over
your shirt stained shoulder. Your
sister, my friend?, Eating popcorn

You left when you were done, me
to make amends to Kathy for the
adolescent floorshow.  To eat
popcorn to stop my stomach
heaving with excitement.  

You told everybody.  I had to walk
through the fog of laughter.
Not even the memory of your
lying words that night
could rub off the smear of
regret.

You showed me deceipt.
I turned my face to the wall,
crumpled and bleeding.

You sent me
to Hell with every

crack of your laugh.



Caroline Shank

I would have written sooner but
I was doing distaff stuff, thinking
of Portia, and getting ready to.go to
the museum of the kind I used
to love as a young woman.

So you see it's been a busy
afternoon.  I can't write
tomorrow because the trees
will be singing in Tolkeins
wartorn back garden. I will
have to endure the casualties.

I'll try to write next week when
the irons of destiny will be
warming up and I can sit for
a minute between the starry
night approaching and listening
to Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

I'm busy these days here
in my cell among the
sunflowers.

Write me back when
you are done planning
my next adventure.
I am, as always, your
own Juliette
of the Spirits.


Caroline Shank

The snow goes away.
You call me out to play Lord.
I feel joy at last.

Temperatures rise,
Spirits dance in the daylight.
You catch me spinning.

Tomorrow gives way
to a dream. A warm balming
wafts my soul about.

You melt my winter
like icicles in the sun.
I run toward spring.


Caroline Shank

Your shade, ma, follows me like a
loaded red wagon .  You are heavy
with the fruit of your youth.
What were you like as a young
girl fresh in the breeze of
morning?

Did you love your mother?  I heard
her singing in her French
voice.  She folded into life in
Milwaukee, spread into death.
She covered you like a
cowl.

You don't cover me.  You are not
allowed. I never cry for you
and that is your naked
sorrow.

I saw you once crying for your
mother.   Are you together now?

Shades rolled over on
the window of my
days and nights.  

Go away  Ma.  
Run for cover from my
poem's imagination.

Caroline Shank

Love melts like chocolate on a face
on a hot Summer day.  You can't
capture it because it drains down
your lips to tomorrow.  

Love falls to the ground and colors
the grass a burnt orange.  The color
of my  heart when you left me
without sound.  

Words unsaid smear.  
Unrecoverable sounds of
midnight kisses elude.

Love remains in me,
before you ever left.

How do I say goodbye
to nothing in my hands?
The silence of
your leaving drips
as you
melt away.


Caroline Shank

Good morning Sunshine, roll over me
in that special way.  Bring out the
juice that warms me.  I see your clear
heat.  You are not invisible to me.

Roll over me Sunshine.
I wait on the day.  Gray days
you hide.  I know.  You are
Tantalus to my Sophia.  I call

you out of hiding to run your
fingers over my skin call
cry to be love touched.

Good morning sunshine. I
wait for your song.  Rub on
my skin.  I am open
and I hold hot hands with
the summer winds.

I am mellowed by your touch.

Caroline Shank

It's the end of another day.  Goodnight Moon.
The sun is gone now and it runs away
from me.  Hello long hours of Sturm
and Drang.  I don't sleep until, drugged,
I stumble into dreams.

I no longer dream of you.  I dream of
the deaths of friends.  I count them.
Some are pebbles, some are rocks.

I trip into my waking hours like a
Redwood falls in the forest.  I walk
forward with a limp.  

I no longer dream of you.
I save sleep
for unimportant things.

Tonight is a blank sky.
It is tears dammed by floats
of lost time.  Unrecoverable
time.

Are you still
softly singing

"Sweet Caroline"  

to the dark horizon.  🎼 🎶?



Caroline Shank

(Do you remember Columbine?  I do.
From Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris
straight through to Anthony Ferrill
of yesterday's Milwaukee nightmare,
the deaths like a drumbeat go on,)

Shooters like thistles crawling
in their dementia to our cities
leave trails as the unexplainable
cancer claws to vine into our
conscience.  We listen to the

words as waves of newspeak
write the epitaph of our known
society.

Deeds as gunshots slap the
faces of we who can no
longer sleep. The panacea of
Peace In Our Time has rotted
limbs.

I live in the branches,
the false years of  the 50's.  
The Days of Our Lives
are indeed shot with a

bang

not

a whimper



Caroline Shank
2.27.20

February in Milwaukee is a quiet time.
Waiting for Spring and trying to lose
weight for the usually beautiful
midwestern summer.

Shots ring out.  The brewery is a
Crime Scene.   Snow falling on
police.  People are dead.  The
shooter too.  No more information yet.

It's a cold Wednesday.  School
children are hustled away.  Hours
in lockdown.  The press scurry
like beetles.  Flashing lights are
blinking like scared eyes in the
crowd.

Over and over the sounds of
chaos are quieted.  Clouds fall
steam and noiseless tears
as people are released to
go home.  A TV reporter
asks banal questions of
survivors.

The brewery goes on melting
hops and grains.  Mash is
safe at least as Milwaukee
bars stock Miller beer to
complete the conversation.


Caroline Shank
2.26.20

You inspire me.  I am somehow
more when I am with you.  
You have given to me the
grapes and the branches
I need to weave my poems
around the ink and the paper
of my imagination.

You took a partial talent and
it blossomed by your fertile
mind.  You knew me as a
tattered vine and wove
my waiting dreams.

I drink to you,
a toast
of gratitude.  

A poet's dream.

Caroline Shank

"I have forgotten your love yet I seem to
glimpse you in every window". Neruda

The closer I come to your image as
I pass the shop windows the more
I can't recall your touch.  My skin
no longer vibrates as you once knew
it.  Do you remember?

I have forgotten your kiss.  Your
red lips in the glass do not resemble
memory.  They are the stain
left in my soul after longing
has gone.

"Because of you, in gardens of blossoming
flowers I ache from the perfumes of spring."
Neruda

I no longer look in the glass to see
you calling.  That I no longer
remember.

Your glimpse is a broken pain
to my still aching denial.

Caroline Shank

It all happens between the cracks.
My life to be cliche.  Light barely
flickers between the shift lines
in the cracked ground.

I worked nights for many years
in a hospital of sunless windows.
I slept badly and spent summers
lying on the mostly deserted
strip of lake Michigan beach.

A suburban by choice, I felt no
real need for company.  Still
don't.  There is always the chance
of a thought misunderstood, a
glance mislaid on the face
of someone outside.  

Lives that are sunlit and brave
always try to haul me out and
unfold my wrinkled insistence.
I wear the pale gleam of darkened
hallways into old age.

I am, by choice, a crone of
undistinguished personality.
A poet peeking out between
the veins of life.  

I am chosen to, occasionally,
shine a little light from under
the sidewalk.


Caroline Shank

The sound of the tenor notes
culled by the expert plying music,
swiping keys and sweat from
the essential melody of the
saxaphone sends me into
the world of the sensual.

I breathe shallowly.  Sigh in
the tender way of notes
brushed against my skin.

I sit in the smoky club as if
alone in my secret self.
Smoke trails from my mouth

as he makes contact.  
The player sees me and
knows my helplessness
as he swings toward me
trailing the sound of his
sax across my waiting lips.

Caroline Shank

The Image of the Old Lady


The image of the old lady
in the saggy coat walking down
the beach won't leave me.

I see her grey haired bun
hovering over the collar
of her tattered coat. The
sand splits in her footsteps.

The gulls holler and swoop.
She doesn't notice.
She thinks he will return
to her here on the sand
where they first made love

forty years ago.  She sees
his red hair coated with sand.
Her tan hands sketch his face
forever in her memory.

She walks with a slow lope,
her brown stockings in
disarray, shoes filled up
with the miles she
travelled in those years
of her husband and kids.

This is her time alone to
pray to God to love him
her love.

Caroline Shank

I slow danced in the living room to the
memories that were even in the 60’s,
old.  

I would stack the spindle with several picks
from my library of “crooners”  Andy, Jerry,
Jack, so many memories.  Listening to the
music of the 50’s would sop my mind soggy..
Johnny Cash walked the line all over me.

I drank the music
of my youth like warm milk.  Time was
I danced to the sounds of American
Bandstand, everyday after school.

The race was on to get home to turn
on the television and watch as ****
Clark and Justine or one of the
Regulars would rate the music that
had just come on the airwaves.

“It's got a good beat and you can
dance to it.”

33 ⅓ records, 45 rpm’s would stack
up on our playroom record player.

My Dad put headphones on my
radio in an attempt to find peace
from the horrible, to my parents,
sounds of the likes of Elvis.

It was the 1950’s and all of
it was so new.  The era of the
Teenager was born.

We had our own money from
lawns and babysitting and could
buy the song and songbooks,
The clothes and cigarettes we
consumed like soda shop
malts and and nickel cokes.

You may not know of these things
you who are the children of the
80’s but we started it all.  

We strolled and twisted before
our freaked out parents.

Now I can still do the dances
But it’s more like a crooked
back and shuffled foot.

But I remember you,
Makeout parties and
Sloe gin in my coke.

I remember being kissed in the
backseat of your car.
so drunk with beer and music.

I remember the long play albums
That are just now coming back
into the stores.  Oh! How I wish
I had my Bob Dylan “Freewheelin’”
album.

I gave them all away when cd’s
took  the sound of the
needle as it ripped across the
grooves of my youth.

It was the best of times.

The worst of times
came later..
.

Caroline Shank
2.17.20

the Queen and the Prince
married in splendor regaled,
the long autumn begins.

You join me.  I am the receiving
slot to your philosophy.  We talked
for years.  You pushed the
red and yellow of your crazy
mind into me.  I was

the join to your metaphor.
You were the tendon which
completed the fit.

Now, lumber on the barn
floor I am martyred.

I tried to love you, my soul
inhaling your every thought.
You unearthed the grain of
my waiting mind.

You finished the fence post
of our friendship and moved
to Cincinnati.  I fell over,
A tear in the fabric of
magic.

Caroline Shank

Five powerful privet hedges formed
a fence in our front yard in New York.
My mother planted them for some
reason, known only to her.

The branches grew sparse and suffered.
Failure to thrive.  Knee high to my
twelve year old body, it never bloomed
in that yard of green weeds and dandelions.

It was meant to keep the
dogs away.  We had feral cats
in the yard.  My brother and I
were feral.  My mother bred us
into the wind of 1940's Chicago.

So that was that for her.  She
retreated into madness from
Chicago to New York to
South Bend.

Fences, like my mother's
addictions, are not always seen.
They crawl up your leg like
flakes of hate.  They keep growing
until your eyes are holes in the
twigs.

A fence so thick you think
only prayers will let you out.
Easter Sunday blooms in
the trailers and filaments.

No relief.  They scratch
on your so small soul.  White
privet petals crawl into crevice
and crease.  

I no longer itch but
tic with the rhythm
of the seasons.


Caroline Shank

My children were the mothers of my soul.
Each of them took me to places I had
never been.

When they were babies I learned
through trials the fears that croup
doesn't **** a 3 month old,
that my daughter wore Holly Hobby
and never told me she hated it.

I learned the Sears catalogue by
heart and always bought the 3 pack
of whatever they had on sale.
They never complained.

I was amazed that my daughter
spent her only 50.cents on an
owl for my collection.  Ruby lives
with me today.

They were mine until they
started school.  Then they
we're feral.  

My stretch marks crawl across me
like fuscia rivulets.  I have
left the itch of them behind.

I am a grandmother to strangers.
A mother to voles.  I bred
them out like songs I can no longer

hear.

Caroline Shank

I want a new literature, something
closer, before the white froth of
language spreads itself on the
sand.  A new book to read, a
clean beach over the world of
my youth.  My mother burrows in
shallow ground, is a bird pecking
its way out.  She drapes herself
in feathers.

I need a new literature.  Something
to hold above the wound where she
rips in and out of me like a
door. A new book to lay over an
old story.

I sift through the silt of this
shore where my world is
dug up with tin spoons.  I grow
old in the quiet of my age,
hear the sound of freedom, see
the last tears run into the
ocean of my regrets.


Caroline Shank

I have collected clocks, chickens,
plates and owls.  In this room where I
savored the sounds and sights of my
long ago dismantled fragments. I reside

alone.

What
should have been
passages to

this, my old age,

it's the clocks I liked the best. They
drove you crazy.

It was always the same.

I'd sail forth on my Journey
of Discovery.  Not for long.

You wanted me to be smaller.
Less involved.  Life to you
was a spoonful.  Rationed
in a war without things.

It was the ticking of the
clocks as they went away
this last time.

It is the ticking of my
surrendered
soul you are left with.

I wait for the last
object to leave.  Then
we will be all but
a tick of time,

alone.

Caroline Shank

Storied history.  Water the
color of your eyes.  The
various blues and greens,
the browns are all reflected

in my soul.

You stand in the cold
shallows . I saw you there
a long time ago, freezing
knees and lips.

I had to kiss you so long
on the blanket we wrapped
along your lanky body.

Lake Michigan.  You called
it my bathtub because I was
so eager to get there every
summer.  

Fossils like smiley faces
washed up into my net.
You helped me collect
them along the brown
shore sharp with the

memory of thousands of
years of brilliance,
Of radiant Joy when
the birds arrived, when
the glacier morained
and you and I fell
in love

on the shoreline of
a great adventure.

Caroline Shank

Do people take car rides
anymore?  Is the cost too
high?

We would spend Sunday's
in the car exploring the
streets and lanes, farms
and small lakes or streams
around northern Indiana.

The weather was always
a wash of sunlight on barns,
small grassy paths, cows
and chickens lowing and
crowing.  

We would stop for a minute,
kiss as if we belonged to the
shade from the trees and
chatter of the singular little
brooks outside the car.

It was always gentle on
Sunday.  The car seemed
to know where to go. I
would slide across the front
seat and with my head on
his shoulder sigh, forgetting
the hundred pages of
Shakespeare that waited
patiently to keep me up

late into the night, the verbs
to conjugate for Monday.
They could wait. I remember
I loved to inhale the music
of the spring.  

A symphony
played as we rolled down
the windows of our pleasure.

Caroline Shank

Not so, really, the seat of spring,
a car of dark cloths, the voice of
boys and whispers.  Do it.

Do it, the lion sleeps tonight
playing on the radio.  Do it.

Forty years the lion is awake.
I remain in the back, handblack,
churning.  My stomach is den
solid now and hungers for the
shallow response.  The song
played then shouts out loud.

Do it.  I wrestled with it, and drowned.

The lion sleeps not I think.  I see
the mane of his black head, the
italian tomorrow of my fourteenth
year roared from him.

I did it in the maw of that music.
I held onto the ****, pretended
to feed the wimoway.  Never done.

I did it to the music of the *******
who whispered to me of the jungle.
I did it to the tune of the ***** that
pinned me to the mighty song.

The lion sleeps.  I think not yet.
Snickersnack the wimoway is
whacked low and I drown in the
song.  I did it, like a nun who fears
perdition if she drops the rosary.

The lion sleeps tonight.  In the jungle
the ******* NewYork night
pads on and on.  I don’t sleep.





Caroline Marie Shank

The lamp is lit, the day undercover.
I wonder where you are?  In my chair,
in my room, on the sidewalk.  I think
I will never see you.  Your face
in the lamplight mirrors the summer
night I called but you never came.

I sit under the light of the lamp
I ponder on my hands.  I held
you beyond understanding.

I promised not to hurt you.
I failed.  I heard myself
cry on the beach we shared
once and briefly.

My eyes are closing. The
light has long ago gone out.

Caroline Shank

I write in flames of love
unallowed.  You who do
not know the pain fly on
Dove's wings

oblivious to the heat,
the colors, the bent
dreams as I reach

For the sight of you.
Fly away.  I will burn
here in the fires of

my hopeless devotion.
I am red with lost
desire.  Fly to the

land, light on the
water, I so long for,

You.

Caroline Shank

I write so you will answer me.
I see you sit, your confusion
curled like hair on a new poodle.

I write to touch your face with
my thoughts.  Know that my
fingers wrap around your sorrows.

I offer my hand in reply to
your silence.  I wait for

you
to touch

me.

Here I am.  I write words
in the wind

which brushes

by you.


Caroline Shank

I should talk about you Ma,
but what is there to say?
You lived like an illusion
inside of a nightmare.

You were born to be a
queen.  You said so
so often I wanted to run
away forever and never
again hear you prattle.

I wanted to love you but
failed.  You were brave
in your illness.  You wore
your psychosis like a
badge.  The crest of
madness suited you.

When you died they laid
you out like royalty.
Finally you composed
the scenery for us,
your subjects.

Michael was unmoved
while I cried.  Daddy was
a wreck washed up on
a lonely island.  His raison
d'etre gone forever.

My tears were a shock.
The last two minutes you
took from me.

I have never returned to
your lonely palace

underground.


Caroline Torpey Shank

Now travels with me like skin.
It's always there.  I can't feel
yesterday.  But I remember.

I remember lp records and
playrooms for the kids.  Me.
I remember Mrs Cleaver
and Donna Reed.
Father knew best.

Make out parties.  Devil
or Angel.  Slow dancing.
Egg creams and cigarettes
at thirteen were a quarter
a pack.

Football. First in ten do it
again.  Cheers and jeers.

The lake behind the school
where we met to go to
the drag races.

Dancing at First **** on
Saturday nights.  The Dog,
The Bird, of course the
Twist.  

Bobby socks,poodle skirts
and crinoline,
boys in in pink and gray.  
Fads.

Getting my driver's license.
Big Boy and Bonnie Doon's
Driving the packed streets
in and out through the
circuit.  All kids all night.

Sleepovers and 35 cent
movies.

But I digress.  Now is
creaks and coughs.  Today
is viewed through rheumy
eyes.  

Now is like walking through
air dragging memory and
tomorrow's shopping lists.

That really is All There Is,
My Friend, said Mae
West I think.  If I can
remember.

Caroline Shank