Hey everyone.  It has been quite a journey here.  I have come to think of you as family.  I love you all.  I am happy to announce that my book, Seedy Town Blues, Collected Poems is available on Amazon, All formats available. Thank you all.  If the link doesn't work, just search the title on Amazon.  If you do purchase the book, would you mind leaving a review?  All of you are great.
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Thomas-W.-Case/author/B0CL2RKDGX?ref=aprdr&storeref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Some people serve
little gods.
They keep them in
a shoe box with
other odds and ends.
They take them out when
they need something.
Their gods don't expect
much of them.
I can tell by the
way they treat people.
Cold and cruel.
Wars break out,
famine hits,
families disintegrate.
And there goes Betty,
reaching up in the
cupboard for her
dust covered god.
She asks it to
make everything okay.
She lights candles for it.
Sometimes she has a
little ceremony.
But her tiny god can't fix
her heart, it's brutal and lost.
It does like religiosity though.

She is safe in
her madness.
A comfortable
tomb, convenient,
but suspect.
I wish it were
a gentle lunacy,
like Don Quixote,
almost admirable.
But it's rabid like
a berserker or
harpy, shrieking at
love and light.
destroying everything.

Some people are
drunk on power, pride,
and control.
When they
wake up and realize
they aren't God,
they change
direction or perish.

If you get the chance, check out Seedy Town Blues Collected Poems by Thomas W. Case.  It's available on all formats on Amazon

I've been going through
a long dry spell, an arid
wasteland of the mind.
Writer's block is hell.
It's an empty nest,
a dead baby bird in
the wet grass--ant eaten eyes.
It smells like plastic flowers on
a tombstone.
I'm lost and starving in
the Whiteness.
Why can't I write?
Have I drank my mind
into mush?
The poems don't come like
they used to; the click is gone.
Sometimes, there were
four or five a night.
They swam from the
rivers of my soul.
They were my food and my light,
and my wings.
A good poem is like
smacking the ball out of
the park, or like coming together after
hours of foreplay.
Writer's block is a
limp ****, a miscarriage, an empty gun.
It's like having a stomach ache,
and not being able to *****.

Everywhere I go, I am
surrounded by convicts, and a
maze of walls.
My mind and spirit are
not in prison though.
They fly over the razor wire like
the falcon I saw through the
bars on the window.
It pierced the clouds like a bullet.
I will make the next
poem a feast.
Blood and feathers will
fall from my chin.
Ambrosia will course through
my veins, and I will
sing and soar from
the depths of my cage.

Light bends through the grass.

making dinner seen by him.

The worm says goodbye.

Time melts away like
a Dali painting,
and my mind flies north;
a Canadian goose against the
loose gray sky,
freer than any man's ever been.
Yesterday, I was a
melancholic little one, feeling all of
Seasons in the Sun, on the radio.
5 years old, in the
backseat of my mom's black Plymouth.

Mom's gone.
Dad is too.
I'm getting old, but I will
never stop searching for that
gold in the heart.
I'm finally the simple prairie man that I
always longed to be.
I smell the autumnal night, and it's
nothing but cattails and bass from here until
that big orange fire paints the
west end of the lake.