I saw a man dead today
Head on
Chest liquid
Legs no longer
The truck he collided with
Totaled
A human sized dent
The bike he rode
Destroyed
The compressions don’t help
Though many try
Human’s banded together for one man
Who stood no chance

In this death I learned
There is good in this world
In this death I learned
There is sadness
Once a friend
Gone for now
Yet he lives on in the friends he rode with
Those who witnessed that horrific incident
I did not know him
I never saw his face
We prayed for him
For those he was with
For those who have seen
For those who grieve
For ourselves

I saw a man dead today
But remembered why we live

I want to be a scientist,
maybe a chemist,
so I can dissect every molecule
and atom of your structure
to prove to the world
that perfection and magic
does exist.

Staring out the window
I only see your face
Smiling, joking, laughing

Across the way, there’s a house
And in it, all the lights are on
Warming, glowing, sharing

And there I could see us
Radiant in all that brilliance
Dancing, living, loving

from an idea by Sheila Sharpe

In the foul heat and damp and rot and stench
After dusting off 1 the bodies of dead pals
The living and the dead, the living dead
Old Boats 2 lit off a cigarette and growled

“They say this stuff’ll **** ya.”



1 Dustoff – noun.  Dust off – verb with an adverb.  A dustoff is a medical evacuation via helicopter, as in “Doc, your dustoff will be here in three.”  To dust off a patient, then, is to transport a patient, not to tidy him.  I have recently read detailed arguments about the terms dustoff, dust off, and medevac, but no one quibbled about such minutiae along the Cambodian border.  

2 Boats – a boatswain’s mate, the brains and muscle of the Navy.  Boatswain’s mates do it all and are seldom acknowledged in history or art, not even in the recent film about Dunkirk.  A boatswain’s mate is often addressed as Boats, and always with deference, even by the C.O.

Whisper Your Area 51

                  “Russian Aircraft Flies Over Area 51…”

                        -U.K. Daily Mail, 31 March 2019

Each of us is an Area 51
In hiding from a psychic bombing run
Behind the barbed-wire fences of our senses
Beneath the radar of our consequences

Our secrets are so secret that even we
Don’t know what they might be, could be, will be
Because the slide-rule calculating hearts
Can only slip between odd-numbered parts

Each of us is an Area 51
Playing hide-and-go-seek
                                                   but not for fun