I dream too much.  I have an
imagination the size
of a planet.
I stay up all night, sleep
like a cat.  Watch movies
on the TV.

I sink and rise and
sink again. Dream
sporadically
of you.  

I think of
past loves.  
It's what getting

old does to me.  You are
the audience for my poems.  
Language is unspoken.
I doze until

Six A.M. when all
my senses call me
to beware.  The night
is hiding and my
thoughts fade into
daylight.

I am on the way
to yet another
dream.

You are the
music.

Tango me tonight?


Caroline Shank

The yard.
The wide green yard.  
The rooster lifts his
trumpet to the Lord.  

There is the song
he practiced for the
sermon.  The choir off the
fence.  The Duck plashed
and the piggie counted
down.

The Serenade, his song
of Songs.  

The chicks wait
as they
we're told to do.

Billy's coming home.

The wooden fence is
cleaned.  
His flag draped.

The song
ready.

Billy fell in the ditch of
Unknowing.  

His war
over.  

The Rooster cries,

Taps.


Caroline Shank

Stones.
Blue dancer.
On a beach
reach
Welcome.

Tomorrow's
Light
The.
Star is

bku+líyhú
In other
words
Loved killed
My mother

Scraped shoe.
Arsenic is
4.0 on
A scale of
death;   b bb bb;

Tomorrow's
Tattoo

**** up.
I am. Alone.

Tattoo
You said?


Caroline Shank
10.3.2024

Tell me


again about flush toilets and hot
water.

I want you to keep it up,  I
sit and sit and “think about

it.
How good my life is.
.
Tell Me stuff of legends.
How God is good.

How love is to one's soul
as rain helps the Garden
    Grow.

Beat It into my failing
feeling.  The heart is
only prescribed to the



Foolish.

Tell Me Again


Tell me to stop weakening
with each flash of you.
Each belly flop of

your caring.

My turn at sublimation
leaves tears on my vocabulary.

To be Wise for you  is to be
as the lonely clef

under songs.

Daylight drives me cold
into

the
Lonely

Night


Caroline Shank
January 9, 2025

So long ago.    
I was always older than you.
You were stronger than I.
It was Summer, you rolled
joints in the kitchen.  I
waited in the other room.

Other rooms, other tales.
I remember the night
we walked to the tavern.
I wrote poems while you
played pool.  I wore red,
you touched my
hand.  I didn't know you,
stranded on the brink of
midnight, waiting for me
to end the song.  

You left me in the rain,
toeing the brush of your
dense backyard.  I called,
my voice thrown in the
rain, the wind's song
tortured with the sound
of tears.

This Thanksgiving.
I will drink alone,
long ago yesterdays,
linger to
tomorrow.

Caroline Shank

That song, that miserable song
will never go away.  That night, the dark night of my soul, is not able to sleep. The pounding of the sound of it breeching the television speakers sends be
back in time.

You know what I mean? The
remnants of a teenage memory
is a sorry stream.  I wake up
every day not knowing if I
will be in that backseat, again. The Lion is awake
and my hands shake with
your memory.  

I am all alone in the space
between reality and nightmare.
My toes touch the floor of the
car, my hand disappears into
the upholstery.  I thought you
liked me.  Funny that.  

The Lion slept all night and
when he woke up he laughed.
My throat ached with the sound
of his roar, the music wimowaying on the radio and I was alone in that crowded
backseat.  

The jungle, the mighty jungle,
rained and the laughter of teenage boys circling the
beat up car smelled of stale
beer and the sodden remains
of my fourteen year old's illusions

died.

Caroline Shank

This is the doctor's waiting room.  
Can you smell the antiseptic mixed
with the cigarettes everyone
smoked when I was a young girl.

The office had a funky smell.
There were lots of magazines and
always the Reader's Digest.
Sometimes I sit alone in the
pine paneled room, waiting..
My mother was never there.
Daddy tried to cope with all the
collosal wastes of time.
He worked hard
in the city. You know about my
mother already.  And the Dr.

The Dr was the only adult who
listened to me for much of my
Youth, it seems to me.
That was because of the Dr. Jane
novels I read over and over.

This catechism of lies
satisfied me. No not the Baltimore.
I know you thought of that
first thing.  This teaching taught
me to not say no to drunken

boys.  It told me this festering
resentment that took hold
of me then was never
a dream.  The poems of
romance and the failure that tried to
drip down my life sap into soil.

This Frustration
always was Magnified by
the mixture of gin and
the lost virginity at 15 to
a backseat ****.

The years have shown the lies
little girls chatechyse.  Except when
I had pneumonia.  

Later he said I was still too
ugly to go to school.  So I went
into the maw of my sixteenth
year.  I cinched my waist of
failures to my secret self.

Then I found out he was wrong.
Somewhat wrong.   I finished
with life at this point and waited for
you to reinstate the proscenium. That
was how I saw it.  Remember
how I cried when they played "the
Lion Sleeps Tonight?   It is the
song of decimation, of the Nihilism
you don't like me arguing with you
all the time.

My life is a tale you don't have
listen to. Careless, incipient,
amniotic dreams of an old
woman you just made love to.



Caroline Shank
2.17.22

Everything reminds me of that short
summer.  The clouds form in ancient swirls of fine candy.  Stick candy.
The Wisconsin breath on my
neglected face still summons the
memory.

Proust has already penned his memoir.

I have as yet been unmined.
You remain like an effigy
on the razor edge of sanity.

I feel the hot hand of our past
rub along the night we
loved and smoked and
loved some more.

The days we were loosed on
the city we held the yellow
breath of anticipation.  

We walked

into night when the dark
fallen Angel laid her hand
on times cruel cudgel
and struck us apart.

The music I hear is the
remaining notes of a still dark
lift of dance.

The touch of you is a reply
in only every breeze.

Caroline Shank

There is no need to
read

here of a wasted life. The
Days slide now into the

abyss.  

Neitxche saw the walls
close in a
drugged
relevation.

I cant scream his name

Or any other.

The echo has landed
And
I am strapped to here

forever.

Oh my God I survive
and You

have

Lied to me.

Caroline Shank
6.20.25

The fires are determined to rub
out the names.  The paths of
thousands of years.  Gone.
The Great Aboriginal voices
are spread thickly through the
ash.

Tomorrow is irrelevant.  The
peace pipes are gone.  The fires
littered.   The White faces cross
California.  The scores are
zero.  The scorched ground
bereft.  

There is a song sung in sadness
among the stumps of sacred trees.
There is a wail from the White
souls.  The Indian sorrows whisper
sympathetically.  

Alone in the smoke.  Our
children dare to rebuild.  Hand
in hand the Ancestors applaud.

Caroline Shank

You are lost to the waking world, a
denizen of the darkness.  I pry my
fingers from off the steel lock.  You
risk the deeping years, the early

yellow springing world laid for you
from my body.  I talked to you in the
corridor of my youth. You only tried
me for.a moment. You took the
pages of my determination and
threw them over the brick lined
walls of your selfness.

You made me witness your dance.
The song you sang, your lyrics
beneath my pillow, the
voice of ancestors not heard until
your music escaped the fences.

My mother did not live to dance
with you.  The songcoated signal
escaped between  your
incomprehensible affinity.

The dance of genetics in full
display.  I am still the Baffled.
The one footed dance  of
the broken, the chondral song
played every evening.

Go behind the schoolyard where
you and the lions of your
collective urges vye to be
the fitest ****** on the block.

My life is short now with my own
kicked addictions. I drowned in
the lake of desire. I have swum
the frigid surf and walked away.

You are not unique. Many sear
the letter of desire across their
bare forhead and cannot traverse
the concourse of the day.  

I will not declare myself aroung
your wheel. I walk through Grace.
If you choose me kneel for the
Benediction of God.

Caroline Shank
5.28.22

I wait for the blue hour.
The time to open the story
into the dusk of
regret.

I am ready to read and
lose myself.  Blue touches
black.

I’m a hungry type of person.
I hang my coat on the tree
and walk into the kitchen

The same kitchen where you
used to drink coffee with me.
The same green walls with
yellow flowered wallpaper.  
Do you remember?

No?  You were
always looking at me as if
I were the only character in
your book.  You knew you
were my whole library.  I
could cover you with
my crying eyes and
you would be there,
in my world, forever.

Marry me
you said but I was
married.  You charged
into the tomb of night.

And I cannot lose
the exquisite pain of
those final pages?

  
Caroline Shank

There is  something in the
air that moves me forward
always off balance, as a
thought glances by me and
is quickly forgotten.  

There is a law someone
never told me.
When I was younger I lived
unbothered by the whims
and movements of change.  
Now I cling, precariously,
to a life untethered.

I see my lorn form
change in the whisp
of a moment.

Regardez moi,
je pleure



Caroline Shank

The cinders under my bare feet
jabbed me in my hurry to the
beach.  The path down from
the street to Silver Lake was
short but painful.  I rushed
running to the shore.

I learned to swim from a wonderful
lifeguard.  From 1st to 2nd to 3rd
rock I spent the summer of my 10th year swimming in the freezing
spring fed lake.

I swam flat out like a fish.  
I listened for his whistle under
water.  Come up,  he summoned me to the top.  I shimmered like a
shook trout in my rainbow eagerness.

I was a pebble unknowing
that my fate washed me up on
the shore
the day I felt the first young
flung feelings of love.

I shot through the ends of
latency like a star.
I never felt it ringing.



Caroline Shank

In this circus of the mind,
you are the dreamraker, the
seller by the booth of riches.
You are the daylight’s yellows
and the blue stratum of sleep.
We knew each other in the
shadowless angle of noon,
bartered minutes, collected
seaside the shells of
poetry.  You opened the door of
tents.  The edges of the sand’s
various galleries collapsed
into rivers, opened into books.
You are the sheik of araby, the
dream-maker, the purples
mornings brush in the eyes
of wise men.

Dreams surrounded the day’s
median.  Time was, red was the
color of afternoons pressed
against us.  Now the tents
move nearer the water than
you.  The past is covered
canvas, the future is the wet
unbroken fabric of beach.

The bazaar closes, tents fold,
pictures painted on the moon’s
memory move on.  You and I
walk to the uncut littoral,
carve footprints in the cool
green silence, the first morning
of the world.

Caroline Shank

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

The Dead


They waft through.
The end brushes their faces.
Reminiscent of
leaves blown against
vegetable skin.  The
landscape soaks with,
saturates with, this
growing out of season.  
Weeds rise from the inside,
and like vines, scale interior
walls, crumble stone, hiding
in the cracks while rooting
for the breast of destruction.


Lives are spread out.
Spilled flowers, and at
the last it all lay written
across the years when the
pulsing, fecund ending, still
in pieces was unfolding
in the weeds.


You don’t know nuthin’ folks.
They wait like children who
know exactly when to get into
locked gardens the mothers
left for a minute for
groceries or shopping, for
a cocktail, meaning to return,
only to linger over the
afternoon.

If you gasp folks in the
second before reality finds
you counting your blessings,
you never looked them in
the face, never saw the
wind part the sky in front
of them, never touched the
ivy stuffing the holes,
where the sadness milks into.


Go home, the dead have
already bloomed.  You can’t
find them in the landscape
of their ends if you have
to ask.  You never knew that
Death which, on the ground,

blows around our faces.


Waits.







5. 14.92

Revised 7.25.24

Beloit Poetry Journal  rejected 7/14/91
The Limberlost Review rejected 8/15/92
The Little Magazine rejected 1/23/93

They won't come back to me,
The dreams.
Fine lines of memory.

I dreamt of you recently.  I
kissed you,  I don't know
where we were but the taste of
you mouth took me
away to the beach of
winds.  The
warm sand.
Soft summer skin.

I lay over sleep  like
a coat
I hide in memories.

Return to me.
The night stretches
and reaches
for you.

I wait again, me,
holding onto the ashes of
love.  


The
night elongates,
that song.
We danced.

I dream of you and the
past lives again. Lights
silver me.  For the time you
hold me I SURRENDER.

Softly.
I walk in your footsteps..

Still.

The detritus of sleep  

remain scattered.

Caroline Shank
November 29 2021yy





They won't come back to me,
The dreams. They curl.
Fine lines of memory.

I dreamt of you recently.  I
kissed you,  I don't know
where we were but the taste of
your flavored mouth took me
away to the beach of
winds and seagulls.  The
warm sand. Your
soft summer skin.

I lay over sleep  like
a coat
I hide in memories.

Return to me.
The night stretches
and reaches
for you.

I wait again, me,
holding onto the ashes of
love.  Burnt.

The reels of
night elongate,
That song.
We danced.

I dream of you and the
past lives again. Bright lights
silver me.  For the time you
hold me I surrender utterly.

Yellow burns. Softly.
I walk in your footsteps..

Still.

The detritus of sleep  

remain scattered.


Caroline Shank




…

That was a different dream, not the one last night where you couldn't
get the door unlocked.  The other
dream was when we walked east
on Capitol Dr. toward the water.

We explored the caves,
the hidden grottos of Lake
Michigan.  We walked so far with
torn experience and
unforgiven memories.  The sky
dimmed in the late afternoon.
We tried to reach each other
in the fading red moments before
awakening.

Last night you couldn't get to me.
The locks were made up of the
Crucifixion and a nun kneeled
before me.  You were frocked
out in gray and threw kisses.

We woke in the same bed where
you vanished quietly to your
whispers of regret.
I remain unseen and unloved.
A torrent of feeling sprang from my
soft and sorry, lonely gray bed.

Caroline Shank

There are things
I did not do.

I did not  touch
you.  

You
died. Without
a sound.

Your soft brown eyes pierced me.
I saw you go in the quiet
way you did everything.
I knew you were gone
but not before I
knew sadly, silently
that
I
could not hold
you in a final

embrace.

Closeness had run out
so long ago,

though we loved until the end,

bereft of speech,
as we we were bereft of
touch.

I bowed to your
blank stare.

I would have died for
you if I could have.  

but I could not
save you from
this destiny

with the Father

Who

Loved

you



Caroline Shank
2.2,2023

You scorn the soliloquy
of my sadness.  The
ubiquitous wind of
Poetry.

But
I always thought the person to
love me would occupy
the spaces between  breathing.

That there, against words,
would be warmth and solace
from the years of loneliness.

But you did not risk my
poem's breathing.

Tomorrow I will go away to
where the disturbed vowels
tell of my reason.
I am the author
of my destiny.

You cannot bear
the blur of my tears
the cry of my years,
the sound of  broken
clefs,  
where once we sang.

I will trace the
notes of this diary,
across the pages of
time.

Alone, again
naturally. 🎼.




Caroline Shank
2.7.22

I am the mother of my

youth.  I cry in places 

no one knows. 


It was the sunline to

Alabama that made

all the difference. 


I closed the 70's with

a bang. 


Today 

I enter this

decade mute.


My white hair falls

to the floor, my bent

back bent by the years.


I knew it would

end like this: 


alone,


by the tree. 



Caroline Shank

1.1.20

It is with bonecrushing sadness
that i report the
     Loss.
The Life destroying
dangle on the
     rope
God provided.

Almost is a hateful
word.
Almost is the
rip on the
     Stick
of Hope.

What now do you want to
     Know?
The War served by the
     Friends of Allah
Praise to His name.

The escape to the West
     failed.
The Earthquake finished
    Our completeness
from happening.

Your Dream became
your

Ticket to Hell

And mine to the
Unmade bed
     empty of Time
and Pleasure

To the Days of our
     Lives
Never to be

Led.


Caroline Shank
April 23, 2025

I've started walking with a cane.
I'm like an old broken soldier.
Under the sofa are parts that do
not fit in rusty sockets.  New
loops and strings cannot

put
me
together.

I missed muster again and
got the letter.

I am
not required
at table

any more.

I spend my days twirling parts
left over from first rounds.
My springs boing hollow
and I don't
see well at night.

What will happen
to
me
now
that I have
seen the moment
of my greatness
flicker?

(I can still
quote Eliot.)

I want you more to
more than move me,
you starting my gears
and I overflow with

Purpose.

Your attention goes
and
I

no longer

see my any
self
at all.


Caroline Shank
2.07.2023

It ain't gonna happen
no more

Ain't gonna be no kissin'
No nor maple tree.

Tomorrow ain't gonna

tell my story
'cause I ain't gonna
see no love'n

Cause you gone and
died away from

me.

There is a favor I called
in, a moment before

you died and the glass
covered your eyes.

I am not singing in the
Chorus.  The Angel's
practice better and

the music calls

your sacred singing
Baritone

No More


Caroline Shank
12.14.23

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