The soliloquies
born of tears,
spoke of Loneliness.
The Plays the Thing.
The Long and Winding Road.  

Hamlet was not crazy,
as some think,

he was alone.

Lady Macbeth scraped blood
from her hands in a
castle of lonely rooms.

McCullers loneliness
was a companion.  

Teasdale wrote of the sea's
lonely foam.

Lear,  alone,  held Cordelia
to the
cold and empty sky.

I know Alone.   It is a wind
just past my skin.   Your hand
on my face is a reflection.   My
skin is uninterrupted by the
conversation of your fingers.

Alone is the road
we travel.  

Evermore.


Caroline Shank
8.16.2022

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

First in 10, do it again. No said
she to his ashes.  The twisted
tale of tomorrow is laid over
today.  The premature moment
of death's blue face took you

to the painted tales of God's
permissions.  Go back to the
mausoleum's privacy.  

If it's tomorrow you could have
meant No.  The bed is unused.
She slept once in a chair and
your ghost brought whiskey.
Tomorrow

is for waking.  The green and
red of your container loosely,
on the shelf, waits to bring
her up to you.

Ring the bell the dead said
when you were new and
not yet freed from the life's
ordained limit

Bury her far away.  You will
not grab her dusty moans
for yourself

She never belonged

to

you

after all.

Caroline Shank
4.30.2023

I cannot exist in the
noise of
heavy
breathing.  

Nght exits.
The wrinkle of sheet,  the
impress of thick tuned
air waits a turning away.

If you don't find me at the
stair know that I loved you.
That the movement of crowds
turned me away

that I saw you wave tonight
to the woman whose
@
Wore your name.

Caroline Shank
April 9, 2023

Written for a contest.

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

The classic curves, the map
Lent from God carried on
the mitochondria, the map

lives on brushes of sable
(If you are lucky) Or even
straw. The curves which,

denied to me,

send the lumps of my

age

over to you with

fear.

of love again under

covers.

The last supper of my

dying.

The caves of mirrors

are your eyes

And the locks on my joy.


Carolina Shank
9.8.2024

I wonder if He can see you?
Is it all you believed?
Do you know now that
believing is the cracked

cement of your time
here.  It was not new.
Are the streets of gold
and are you walking in a
white gown?

Tomorrow I will write in your
journal of the Jabberwock.
You know him now, the painted
struts of glove and spats.
He tells me stories while your
world ends.

His bandersnatch is not
what you believed. Beware
the marble veins of his
indifference.  He says he will
En garde and you will fail.

You will, to the ground, bleed
in your reminisces, as he
walks into the water to wash
your lies with ***** soap.

Beware the stance of shaking
legs, the bleat of strangled sheep.
He cannot see you in your
personhood for he would
crumble into mad bad shoes
and slither away to your
last poet's rhyme.

Snicker Snack.


Caroline Shank
2.10.2023

I love your fierce approach. You swash
at me.  With strong arms you cut the air.
I feel the breeze of your determination.
You look like a soldier.  The art of love
is a frenzy of intensity. You can't take
me without a battle.  

I am the rose-holder, you are the steel
clad rider.  You joust to win my favor.
I throw petals to path your way to
me.  The minstrels play.  Sing amen
to this afternoon.

You have won the day! I am the
receiver of your presents.  Fifty years
have passed. My trodden soul is
bare. You rode the steed of truth
and beauty.  

It is my turn to write your name
in a church of sorrow.  To try to
climb down my lofty seat.  I kiss
you fairly my true warrior.  The
last joust was now.


Caroline Shank
5.26.22

I love your fierce approach. You swash
at me.  With strong arms you cut the air.
I feel the breeze of your determination.
You look like a soldier.  The art of love
is a frenzy of intensity. You can't take
me without a battle.  

I am the rose-holder, you are the steel
clad rider.  You joust to win my favor.
I throw petals to path your way to
me.  The minstrels play.  Sing amen
to this afternoon.

You have won the day! I am the
receiver of your presents.  Fifty years
have passed. My trodden soul is
bare. You rode the steed of truth
and beauty.  

It is my turn to write your name
in a church of sorrow.  To try to
climb down my lofty seat.  I kiss
you fairly my true warrior.  The
last joust was now.


Caroline Shank
5.26.22

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 learned early that **** was the form
of choice for ***.  Not that the act was
named or the ****** ugly.  

Where in the world are you all now?
you mealyworms.  How like you to
teach me violence as love and leave
me to learn the lesson so well.

I recline.  **** is the sharing of two
faces.  Your face smells of beer and
your pounding hips ground me.  I
lie.  You are a broken bottle smacked
against a building on a hot summer night.

You are the cigarette before left in the
weeds.  I learned from you not to trust
the backseat of cars, to wait for calls
from the garbage man’s son.

Trash man, black car, you hung
on a tree.  All your sperms dangle
in the light of the bowling alley, shine
in the rubber.

Old man, pound on me till you think
I am satisfied.  Old man.  Eat ****.
        old man eat ****
        old men eat ****, grow bald.
        Remember me in the dashlight
        I was the fifteen year old rubbed
        drunk, sunk under the haze of
        horror.  You were the gun.


Caroline Shank

Bored little girl so long ago.
Red Keds and a sailor's
hat.

The roses grew by the
door.  Mother
didn't notice the lacey

frill of their demise.

Or hers.  The summer
of the song was hot.

Lions.  Teenagers fit
full of ***** and
Kent cigarettes.

There she sits behind
the school gym.  The
player piano

accompanying

the tap tap of the
ash.

Fourteen was a sepsis.

Was, was.  Was.
A heartbeat of
dark nights, taunts

gone wild.

Memories in the mind
now so
Long
Ago.

She sits still, her
pleas for please

to let go.

To my 78th summer
wires of time twine

before the tunes
played

Long ago still
fresh as the summer
behind the empty

school.
Over and over.

Plagues are breathing
still

In the wrinkles of

My

Memory


Caroline Shank
January 19, 2025

"The Lion Sleeps tonight". Do you remember that song?  I hear it on the
radio over and over  again.  The time
has come…  oh oh I am about to mix my allusions.

I am, like Alice, small inside the music.
The cliff tops of sounds are passing
before my eyes, the wind in my ear
is loud. In the jungle, the mighty
jungle, the lion paws at my scarred
heart.  His claws rip my bodice
open and blood drips on the car
seat.

Have the courage to say goodbye.
You bore me with your growling
and your furry tongue reaching
down my throat. I sing to myself
blurred lyrics. You choke me
with time away and distance
travelled alone.

I will die by myself before you sing
to me of loneliness and crap
excuses. There was beauty in
the jungle before that song
wrapped around my memory.

You were not the first to ask
me to visit midnight, to taste
the hushed and slander of
the dark jungle.

I navigate paths you only
dreamed of in me.  I roll
the canopy away and I am
in my bed alone filled with
horror at the slashed path

I trod with you.


Caroline Shank
Jun2 12, 2022

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

March 9, 2001

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

There were always men
when I was a young
girl.  
Summer men.
Big
as trees,
loud as
thunder.  
Bright,
soft
round
eyes.

I loved the men of
summer.  They
breathed
in
warm
breezes

When I was young
summer men wore
soft
brown
skin.

They
glistened
sunlight.

Oh when I was young,
I did love
their
rub on
my tan
hands.

Now
I am
oiled by
memory.


Older men
are
happily
in
disguise.


Caroline Shank

The substance of our
relationship is the accident
and the spin of
time and the whirl
of this existence is
in the potency.

You are because I am. These
blue eyes are the essence.
The substance of an early birth
in a long tunnel.  Truth erased
by a minute's pleasure.

This poem is a radical
moment. Time stretched to
the limit of potency.
We are or are not determined
by the body and soul of
our essence.  Whether we
exist or not is in the
form of the attention we
each bring into this…

Time together is the soul's
determination.  We can only
form the intention.

Intention without form is
matter without you.

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

Today is a mistake, an aberancy
of time. The facts please.

No.

There are no facts when you
love someone.

The day, like a Harlequin novel
opens. The goblet in her hand
falls, the flowers can't catch up.

Think of spilling love like
milk.
You can never save
the white oil slick spreading.

Tomorrow will never come,
There will be only 15 minutes
of night.  

Memories
crawling into daylight

unexpected,

Finally,

constellations
slide across the sky.

The final ending:

“ your appointment with (sorrow) death
was always to be

here.”

Caroline Shank
6.13.2024


Agatha Christe

Along the dun street
where her shoe's sad
heal broke,

the early summer morning
moving tic toc's.  Bruised from
your grip on the blue back
stained rip

as she left her purse on the
dresser.

Tired, she was sun smudged.
Her maroon hair's curls lay
like small sea creatures,
ringlets of the aftermath.

The cataclysm of your
*******.  The quite
almost toppling from
Grace embraces shared
skin the color of

tapioca.

The blank side of
yesterday's

shouts

came with her soul's
cry of

Victory!

Tired was the force that
finally chilled
the memory.

The climate still
Humid.   The garden
growed.



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

The music plays

on down the years.  


Her tears fall

run


a weep of 

years sweep


eras


written on pages

old memories


the stationery bold

with sorrow.


He loved her not

to lose her but


he never knew

the mind around


her prayer


for his memories 

refrain.


Her songs


are blowing 


spores


to the wind.




Caroline Shank

The mystery is not so much the
deed Tom but why.  

Of course the karma of
my acquaintance celebrated the
dedication with which I floored
the pedal over the years.

No I didn't leave an opportunity
unvisited, a door unopened, a cup of coffee undrunk,
or a walk down the evening hours
to the music of possibilities
unsung.  I learned to rub the
consequences into my benefit
and gave my response to the

night air.

I lie prone now reading on the
living room couch and ponder
the times.  An unseen vessel
pilots me from behind.  Hope is
when I sail her into the

long sought after meridian,

when the time
for poetry is over
and in the
afternoon I find your

conversation

waiting


Caroline Shank
3.1.2023

It's all behind me now.  The
days of wine and roses, and you.
I was young in the tender
of my years.  

You were curled and red, the
tight nights of summer dimmed
my eyes.  The breezes
of June were wrapped embraces.

In these, my last years here, I dwell
on summer.  No matter the cold of
Wisconsin, it's the brilliance of
then that I rub on my face like
fine oil.  I remember the incense.
The musk of your scent
lingers.

We were a tune that played for
the span of one summer.  It
is as strong in my memory as ever
were your hands on my face.  

Once when I loved you,
almost fifty summers ago, I
promised I wouldn't hurt you.
But you left me to
broken poems.

I am wooden in my age
and I dance with hard
shoes.  The days are
long and the nights
no longer sing.

Caroline Shank

I am reminded of Florida and the
sunshine. The heat of memory.
I loved the years spent with you.

The slant of time, the curls of
daylight. Walks on the sands.
You took my forever talking
with smiles.  I remember

the last days there, combing
for memories. Packing the
pictures to satisfy the cold

north screaming winters.

You were wrong to leave me
halting, grimacing, the nurses
alone your last

Lovers.

Caroline Shank
1.1.24

It's always a question of time
in the end isn't it? I mean
"Time present and Time past"
the Poet said, are embedded in
Time future.  No. In
my opinion, not either in Time Now.

Minutes walk away from me in a line of embedded beads,
choices appear like scenes filmed on plastic cameras.  They are cartoons of yesterday gone to the dustpan.  Celluloid clicks
deeply out of hearing.

There is no one to wind
the clock. It lies on the
ground in cinematic pieces.  
Tobey never could mend it.
  
Time future is not
all that eager to be born
only now that you
have exited the scenery.

Listen! the minutes are all
gone.

The wine and the song like
the minutes are all gone.


Caroline Shank



"Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable." The opening lines of TS Eliot's Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets

I write you when I am labored
With forgetfulness.   I am
Unfolded. My drawn out tears
slip with a staggered downhill
run.

To my amazement I am dead.
The sounds of you pleading
have passed and in my relief
I rest on your letter.  

Time me Kangaroo down boy

I'm still in love with you.  Ha!

When you fell down the tunnel
was there a bright light? Like
in the stories? Did your mother
warmly call your name?

You didn't hear the hollow
hospital call from my torn
throat.

I will go smoke now. I picked
up the old habit from a rushing
rabbit. He said my time will
be soon and my sins scrubbed

off.

Why?


Caroline Shank
8.6.2022

At what point do I cross over
to the unknown spaces?
Fires carve.  Smoke
marks the places of memory.

"Beyond this point there be
dragons."  

I run to the flat humid
edge of the world.
Under my feet is lava.  
"Is this a dream? "
I ask the lone
sparrow.

"Hurry" he said "Run
before
the wind loosens your
madness."

There is no room to
sit in this desolate
geography.  I am bound
to the edge with laces.

Call the naked lion.
Retrieve for me
the last vestige of sanity.
The remnants of sensation.

I remain alone on the
precipice of thought.
Find me, if you can,
amid the char and
debris of your last

goodbye.  


Caroline Shank

There is no world without
you in it.  The climb up times
ladder
is empty of rungs.

There is fire in my mind.
There are clinging bones,
clogs
Of dislocation.  Tomorrow
rests on the slippery south
of today.

If you deliquesce there where
you daysay
I may slip on what remains.

The rest is not my business.
I have two worlds
to choose from
on a bare basis of
belief.

There is no sense to science.
Blow up the universe
to your expectation of ruin
and

I never knew my own
legend.


Caroline Shank
10.22.2024

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

My husband is ill and watches me
as I talk.  I clean him up and pretend
tomorrow there will be music.
We married in the
rain for luck.

Beware the white shoes that
pinch, the veils of tomorrow's
promises lie.
Shake the hair from
Sunday.

The children
are built from
undercover conversation.

We go along without a song.

We talk without a kiss.

In the still of the night
memories splurge.  The
flat back of the sax

plays out of tune.




Caroline Shank

You were young, on the
cliff of summer. Amazing stirring
possibilities.  Running in
the rain.  Stars hid.
Crepuscular love on
the brink of light.

Wet and loud you toked
a joint without me.  You
footed the soil.  Your
name became reckless.

Young is not the only way
your wet strings tore at
you. Screams from the
doorway dove into the
beds of dead flowers.

Many years spinning and
the muddy leftovers of
yesterday toe the mind,
eclipsing memory.

It is waiting that brought
you to this place.  Your
red hair under the
Summer sky shone.

The years after the caul
lie on your thoughts, reluctant
to uncover nascent
feelings.

You inhale.

I write to bring home the
surreal sun on the skin
of time. Before

you left
me.

Caroline Shank
12.5.22

The voice, the bell-yellow
voice of the sax plays on.
Under the mind like a layer
of canvas lie the brushes
and strokes, the arms and legs
of memory.  The arrival on the
skin of sound is the moment
of love.  The unfurling of
the pallette.

You say, listen, the wail of
breath on brass is mine.  No,
it is yours.  The voice, no
longer alone, even when
unaccompanied, falls from
the blues of evenings or the
reds of afternoons, approaches
with footprints in sand.  We
are castled in music, our
colors unfurled.

Our fingers on the keys.  We
see the archetype of design in
the sound of the sax, the
movement in the fabric of
stripes.  The sound’s colors
draw us to each other.
Listen.  The wail of breath
on brass is everywhere.
Listen.


101793

The voice, the bell-yellow
voice plays on.
Under the mind like a layer
of canvas lie the brushes
and strokes, the arms and legs
of memory.  The arrival on the
skin of sound is the moment
of love.  The unfurling of
the pallette.

You say, listen, the wail of
breath on brass is mine.  No,
it is yours.  The voice, no
longer alone, even when
unaccompanied, falls from
the blues of evenings or the
reds of afternoons, approaches
with footprints in sand.  We
are castled in music, our
colors unfurled.

Our fingers on the keys.  We
see the archetype of design in
the sound
the movement in the fabric of
stripes.  The sound’s colors
draw us to each other.
Listen.  The wail of breath
on brass is everywhere.
Listen.


Caroline Shank
Revised 3 28 2023

Thought is always with you like a child
growing in your deepest spaces.  To think
is what you were born for.  You are alive
with questions that brood in your mind
unlimited possibilities.  What do you
read, you who are books?  You
press yourself.

Thought pounds within you.  Each beat
is a hundred years of knowledge.  You
were imprinted on intelligence.  Your
selective Mother.

Thought is always with you.  Lines of
poetry choose to be born through your
fingers like red drips on the page.  You
are in labor, the constant ache of
creation.

You were born in the dark, celestial,
implosion.  You enter through a door;
access to the deepest recess of
experience.

Caroline Shank

The Towers dropped to their
knees in abject despair.  Gone
were the friends who decorated
the windows, hallways, and
who wore flowers in their hair.

Gone were the days and nights
of light shows on hanging
gardens.  The Towers fell down
in pieces that no Kingsmen
could put together again.  Time
screamed in tatters of suits
and dresses.  The restaurant's
water boiled.  The Maitre 'd dropped to his knees, fell
through the floor.

The Towers were gone to
soldiers everyone.  More
elusive were the fragments
of burned bodies.  The screams
tore through the morning.
Sirens drowned the bells
and still the sounds of sudden
grit-filled voices cry.

The Towers brought more
sorrow to the flowers still
showing in the tears of lost
souls watching an end to
mercy.

Never to leave the shadows
of nightmares, the Towers
will live on in perpetually
beating hearts.   No one
forgets the morning the
sunlight was betrayed by the soulless murderers whose airplanes slit the air like silver bombs. Rogue foreign pilots with death scheduled for our
September morning.

We will continue our elegiac
song of Remembering.

Forever.



Caroline Shank
9.11.20

The crepe paper days of late June,all of them, the Summer of 74, are on
a spinning boat  in my old imagination. I have ridden the warm
days and lingered over a shared
joint by the light of a satin moon
for so long now I no longer shake
myself to be sure you haven't
gone, like a stone on the lake's shore,
which, when washed up on the moraine, dangles in a wave and is
gone again.  As with you

on a raining night, running for
someplace to hide.  Death almost
did part us.  As the marriage
of two souls, destroyed, died.

Lest you ever learn of my long, lingering, pain, know how I loved you
old as when we were young and
ragged with the raw edges of an
impossible dream. But you
left me and in the undoing of myself
I woke alone from the sting
of unbelief.

Sorrow does not preclude death,
but it is in the years of grief, searching for a way across the long embattled
memories,

that we die.



Caroline Shank

I. The wind blew.

The journey was rough.
They bent to avoid the
amber sand.

Joseph was fierce in his
Orthodoxy

Mary encircled the
Child. Tonight
would change
The World.


II. Bethlehem

Jesus CRIED, the
wind  stopped,
         the

Light of the World

        Arrived.



III.  Christmas.

   The
journey of the Magi.

The storm burned in
the night  A voice
In the wilderness
shouted.

Peace came briefly.
Midnight

slouched

toward Bethlehem


Caroline Shank
12.10.2022

The curtains hang over widows that have not been opened
for years.

I am scared to raise the yellowed
shade.  Behind the grime of ages the half rolled up crackling
fabric has tales to tell.

Yesterday is gone, tomorrow
may not fall from the transom.
I am aware of this other space
above the dust and mouse
droppings on the sills of
yesterday.

If you ever come here again
you will find the splats where
my tears have spilled.  The
view from the second floor
window is distorted by my
sad eyes.  

I will be near, ever near, to
you here in this place of
memories where once we
swayed to music
from another room.

It was all so long ago when
we were young and dancing
to the sounds of
unrequited love.

Open your eyes.
I am standing by the window
abandoned to the rains.
The streaks of your young
face never fade no matter
the years.

The shade remains in place.
My thoughts steam
on the ***** glass.
My breath never distorts
the singular mission to
redeem the past.

If you return here you will
find me dreaming
alone by the marks
of yesterday.


Caroline Shank

The Winter Of Discontent!

I forgot
what blew the

winds  of another
Winter

coursing over me.
Tomorrow has eyes

on my child. The last
chance.  

Doomed
wind numbed the
underbed of all the

legends.  

Those it
could reach for a
quarter and some
salt.

I am happy

To know

you

I said to

God.

Goodbye


Caroline Shank
3.5.2024

the candles are lit
the wisemen travel abroad
I bow to midnight

The desert is cold
this December night across
the moon's path to Him

there is joy in the
air the angels sing out loud
sing a choir breathing

thank the Lord of my
salvation.  I have little
to give the one I love.

but He has raised my
heart to His acknowledge
He will be here soon.

three men arrive at
a stable door with gifts for
the Son of God cries

out loud love will win
and I am handed the night
the whole world rejoiced


Caroline Shank

I never saw things falling off
your shelves.  I didn't grasp
the hands of the clock who
bore witness to your aging,
frail thoughts.  The lack of
tremors fooled me.  The
mood swings were the
arthritis, oh! the pain.

I was so little then, so wrapped
up in my own sorrow.  I glanced
up and you diminished.  We were
old, our lives run out.  You took
the memory breach as a left
turn to Heaven. You cried when
you thought me unfaithful.

Never were you so.wrong.   I
served you silver but you
pointed to the floor.  My tears
were landslides.  Tomorrow
kept coming and the ashes
rested.  I walked out of the
chapel with sticks.

The years go on and I am

so still

in the

jungle,

pray to be eaten.


Caroline Shank
04.17.2023

They're all dead, the men who
loved me in the backseat or
on the water bed.  Or not.
Or mostly.

Bless please the memory
of warm nights and street
lights.  The rock and
roll of hips blinded by
loves.  The music

of traffic going by.


The voices of love in
the night.  Rhythm
me now.


I loved the rhyme of hips,
the Song of
Throats rolling and
sibilant.  

Ghosts who haunt me.
Let us pray.

Come to me tonight.
Rescue me from

long nights with the

Lamp's signal's

Flash incessant.


Caroline Shank
12.6.2022

There are things that I have done.  There are songs that
I have sung.  The Beatles
said it best.

I have been pregnant twice.
It was a long time ago.  Now
my grandchildren are grown.

I have held a few jobs. I did
them well.  My bosses were
pleased.  Well not Tim. He
was a *******. But Joyce was Amazing.

I have been friends with
wonderful people.  All except a few have left of no accord.

I am lonely in old age, barren
of thought. Yet still I write you
my phantom friend.  I hug
myself and long for the cigarette days.  The nights of Tia maria
and wine.  Do you still put
your lips around the bottle?
You said not to spill a drop.

The summer's by the lake.
My tan self at home in the
suburb of my youth and
middle age.  I was startingly
free and loud in laughter.

Everything in my plot of
Summer smelled of you.
Years ago when you lied
lovingly so as to keep me
in the cocoon of your
conversations.  I was
unfooled. I remain in the
mind of Narcissus, your
willing amanuensis. X the
night of unremembering
all these years of you.

Caroline Shank

Things On My Living Room Wall

I collect things, clocks and chickens
mostly.

         The secret to things is the
way they (you) fit in the space
wherein my life, refracted like a
          Kaleidoscope on a
winter afternoon stretches to
touch me.

        Day (Love) is a mirror, a silver
lined looking glass placed like a
trophy over the catchall mementos
          of (you) the times (we) spent
leaning over the bridge.

My frames
tilted to the downside of yesterday
.        
          I thought the assorted colors
were (our) memories until someone

          traced the lines of (simply)
life between the slats of my

          memory indicted of
your coins to pay the porter.


Caroline Shank
7.4.2023

I'm tired of love
poems
The laundry of
attraction.
I weary of
sadness reiterated
Everywhere.

The wombs of
Creation
Are omnipresent.
I read your sojouron
into the skin side
of this
Madness.

No I don't know what
you mean.  The
Rhetoric of the
young, of the aged,
that moan of the years
that stretch, the direction
Empty
of arms to hold you,
of Kisses too
silent,
of hearts that beat
Alone.

Send me to the banks
of literature.  The Ganges
where dust quaffs and
Fire burns and there is
only the poetry of tears
for the

Unforgiven.

Caroline Shank
7.12.2022

I know some things. I know that
entropy is unusable. I know that
hot is fast spinning molecules.

That my love is true to my
heart.  We spin together.
We look into a Heaven of
swirls.  Light captured between
us is always in motion.

We, Tango dance through the
eons.

No this is not a good poem.
This is what I mean:

You are the half of everything
I am, the play’s denouement
My song’s tune.

Tomorrow will always be
today, love will always
wrap the vowels dancing

between us.  We R.
There are many powers to us.

We spin.  Kisses on a white

Wing

Destiny is soft. We have lain
in love and thrive

forever.


Caroline Shank
9.4.2024

Gaza

There is in the madness
of this planet a hopelessness,
a sadness beyond which we
cannot crumble.  

Scraps of inhumanity are
sweepings the winds of
Hell blow up to circle the
soft underbelly of
civilization.  

Nothing in which we are
to believe, is left on the
soiled platform of ignorance

There is no place for prayer,
the Psalms are lost.
No fires burn to heal
but to destroy.

There is one left that
Jesus loves who cries
in loneliness, the arms
that reach one time

the voice that, alone,
says yes to the flames.
You cannot burn my
heart

I love and you cannot have
the name of my beloved.
On my soul is written
the future
after the fires are out,
when the children hold
tomorrow

and I and my love
are free.

Caroline Shank
9.29.2025

Tomorrow is the day my poem
is about you.  It's never today that
turns my heart to the rhythm
of the Gulf's.  
curved
shore. The dial always  tuned to
the meridian… south,.

Tomorrow I will write my poem
where I belong,
with you and long beaches,
canvas chairs and white gulls
screaming above our
heads along the shore.

Tomorrow, poetry will be
written and love consummated…

I write you anyway
Sammy,  Today,
Gray under shells
on a white
sand beach.
My *******
leak.

This poem
can't wait.


Caroline Shank
3.24.22

To think about getting old?
Ay that is the question.
Tomorrow rapes the day
of sentiment, the curling
onion skin that never

unrolls.

Any mind cannot comprehend
old age.  The loose tooth,
of retirement falls out.

Hope falls from yesterday
when,  albeit time allows,
the young scalawag cross off

future’s possibilities as the
insensible droppings of
the cat who remain in the
corner.  The shedding of

youth’s romances.

Old age ponders through
rheumy tears the last
kisses , the shoulders
on which shawls

Droop


Caroline Shank
10.8.2024