Leaves of one tree,
And if one leaf with your name on it falls,
The Angel of Death comes to take you.
14/1/2023

Weekly bath
Sitting on a shivering branch
Falling powder like water
colored finch splashes around
All the drops turned into winter
Now only showers of snowdrops
Making him sad.




Shell ✨🐚

She Wrote Again

She wrote again. I found her
letters, looking for the storm
of him.  The wind knocked
red hair, the black boots left
outside the door.  I read that

he left on a Sunday, walked
away without his trademark
whistle trailing Oh Shenandoah
behind him.  

The dim days followed.  She
asked everyone, where he was,
his blue eyes a DNA call away
from her.  There was no
response.  

She had no speech left and
the nurses were glad to be
rid of the man in the picture
on her broken table, broken
between the war years and
liberation.

She glanced backwards in
her dementia.  The rough
hewn Sundays, the lost
afternoons.  Her disappearances
not the less tiresome, were
gone.

She wrote letters over the same
paper, shop worn stationery,
over and over.

When she stopped it was on a
sunny afternoon.  No one knew
she left for the day before his
kiss became goodbye, with a
smile of relief.  

Caroline Shank
1.11.2023

~for r, just because~


put her in my mouth and she became my
mouth.

put myself inside her and she became my
insides out.

spill good words on her belly, licked & laced us together, then came my 
poetry.

on elbow, she claimed coauthor-ship, demanded her name above        
          mine.


I smiled, answering most matter-of-factly,
surely they’re your creations, you-a-ruler, procreator, foremost, first,

the ABCedarian

the muse goddess of alphabets, all that is poetic divine mistress to
thousands

I’m mortal,
your transcriber, copyist, alphabetically seconded, merest mere,

the ABEcedarian

I’m rudimentary without you, lost midst the masses o’poets nameless.

She snorted, said
“sounds like poetic ******* to me”*
but returned to her sleepy heaven,
mumbling most contentedly.

Would it be easier to love me if I were a boy?
Would I be easier to love if I just lay there?
Not moving, still, unchanged.
There's nothing left for you here.
Tell me what you see when you look at me,
am I still yours, am I still pure?
I fear there's nothing left of me.

I'm in your grasp, let me be
a simple "no", I suppose, would set me free.

Love is a chain,
Love is a prison,
Love will make rain,
and subdue you with poison.

It shackles my growth
of leaving you, I loath.


I was never meant to be found,
by you, leave me unbound.