on the tree branch
outside my window
a squirrel chews furiously
on a walnut

as sales have fallen
business declined
frustration
is a fat sweaty man
sitting on my chest
i cannot breathe
i surrender
and lay as if dead

watching
outside my window
as the squirrel
finally cracks the shell

(C)2012, Christos Rigakos

under dirt
in a box
no voice
     teaching about nutrition
no breath
     exhaling cigarette smoke
a brain
     shrunken
          no more knows
shut down
     irreversibly
          dismantled
in silence
in a box
under dirt

(C)2012, Christos Rigakos

empty bench
beside a grave
silence


(C)2012, Christos Rigakos

for months we grew in knowledge and in love,
through loving--leaving--loving, holding still,
always both snarling wolves and cooing doves,
both love and anger rendered my heart ill,

i bid her fond farewell but for a spell,
to clear the mind and cleanse the ailing heart,
i asked, please wait, yet if you can't, be well,
and find a good man, make a brand new start,

i watch her from my secret distant place,
her growing closeness to a man i chose,
my blessing sits half-twisted in my face,
both wishing well and not, to what now grows,

though bluntly wrong for me i so adore,
the one i've loved for months behind my door

(C)2012, Christos Rigakos

Once in a while frustrations boil over,
spilling all over my white shiny stove;
dousing to smoke my flickering pilot,
exhaling my courage like inert gas.
And woe to anyone smoking their anger
'round me or near or yet even far;
I’ll blow up a tempest in porcelain tea cups
and throw up a hell of a storm in a jar.

(C)2004, Christos Rigakos

I hear the colors waving in my thoughts,
with yellows rising, reaching to the white,
and falling grand arpeggios to blue,
then burying to violet and black,
beyond the grave of my perceptions—gone.
The undulating rhythms flickering
like candle flames of solemn holy mass,
an everlasting birth-rebirth of life
in rampant earthly sprints that, to and fro,
arrive and leave like those we’ve met and known
who’ve disappeared and now simply exist
in just such thoughts, as colorful and vain.

(C)2004, Christos Rigakos

I oft' remember him with what he wore
at home, so often in his leisure time,
those cutoff sweat pants and those dull grey socks,
and right away I see him sitting there,
the corner of the couch, the one at right,
a dinner plate upon his lap, so full,
Lo Mein with beef and rice, duck sauce on all,
a burp, then slapping tummy, sounds are made,
oh, why won't he do anything again?
what would I pay to have him back again?
to hear his laughter and his joking ways?
the memory, it fades into a snap,
as I am jolted back to here and now
where absence sits alone on this here couch
and I can only call him in my mind.

(C)2007, Christos Rigakos