If ever you feel lonely and unloved,
and even  hope evades your desperate grasp.
Remember there are people here who get you.
Supporting all  those who post here to the last.

No mute inglorious Milton need you be.
At this site you will be both heard and seen.
Spin your tales of heartbreak love and loss.
We only ask you keep the language clean.

You poets in the trenches are our heroes.
Star shells burst as you cross no man's land.
You marshal verbs and set he line of battle
with every sibilant syllable you command.

Buried on this Island in a tiny unmarked plot,
You would have been my son or daughter
but she decided to abort.
It would be nice to have been consulted,
But that’s a right men haven’t got.

You might have been a beauty
as your sister is today.
Or You might have been a scholar
if not commingled with this clay.
There is no stone where I can grieve;
No plot to kneel and pray.

Just this burial ground of paupers
I am visiting today.
It is my fault as much as hers
I do not seek to blame.
If only I could have  held you once
or given you a name.

The winter chill cuts to my core.
I feel a sense of sin.
I’m reminded the saddest words of all
Are these:“what might have been”

The  general was in a race with Death.
His memoirs ,if finished, some comfort would provide.
Yet a cancer was eating  at his throat.
His doctors all thought it a matter of time.

Each day he forced himself to write,
although his pain could not be denied.
Sometimes he caught himself staring at his gun,
Entertaining thoughts of suicide.

No, he thought, that's not my way.
The book I'm writing will provide
for my wife Julia in her old age;
an old age I will be denied.

With a firm command of names and dates
He spun his tale of Civil War.
Eight years in the White House He spent.
Years marked with scandals not seen before.

He had seen his share of war
Surely no man longed more for surcease.
He sent his final chapter to press.
Word shortly followed: "Grant is deceased."

It was cold, it was wet and a cruel North wind blew
as I walked at the edge of the shoreline with you.
At our feet- dying starfish, several thousand all told.
They lay dead on the beach from the unnatural cold.
There were some ***** and lobsters and anemones.
Some could survive being cast from the sea.
For the rest shock and death was their imminent fate.
(At least they were spared winding up on a plate.)
These are strange times in Britain; so much ice and snow
and the Ocean so cold with such strong undertow
that thousands of starfish were cast out of their Eden.
There’s a message in this that we need to be heeding!
This planet is dying and, unless we repent,
our fate is another extinction event.

Beneath the Coral Sea, located nearly two miles down,
A submersible was sent to search, and the Lexington was found.
The ship known as “the Lady Lex” had been rent by shot and shell.
For four long days she stayed in the fight until the final bell.

Two hundred and sixteen of her crew went down with her all told.
Internal fires burned white hot and ran out of control.
Scattered about the mighty Lex, her wildcats by the score,
these fighters, built by Grumman, have seen the last of war.

Men Die, Steel rusts, and memories fade of battles gone before.
Her struggle becomes legend and she enters into lore.
It is a watery grave she found beneath the Coral Sea.
But her brave crew and pilots made her mark in history.
The Japanese had been repulsed from fair New Guinea’s shore.
Within a month Midway would mark the turning point of war.

James Bond was a dissolute youth
who spent his nights drinking Vermouth
I was shaken, not stirred
when they gave me the word
that his blood test came back ninety proof.

She had, she knew, been careless,
But what’s a girl to do?
It’s hard to watch the clock
when a Prince asks to dance with you.

At the first stroke of Midnight
She turned and fled the ball.
Other than one glass slipper,
she’d left no trace at all.

Her coach turned back to a Pumpkin.
Her rat coachmen scurried home.
Her gown turned back to homespun.
Her splendor all had been on loan.

The Prince had been heartbroken,
She was ever on his mind.
The girl who danced into his heart,
then left her shoe behind.

He knew he had to find that girl
And ask her for her hand.
She must become the princess
of his tiny far off land.

The Prince set off upon his quest,
The glass slipper in his hand
He meant to try the shoe
on every damsel in the land.

The day came when her stepsisters
were asked to try the shoe.
As both of them wore size thirteen
They simply wouldn’t do.

The wicked stepmom then broke the shoe
Before Cinderella had her chance
To slip into the slipper
that she’d lost at the dance.

As the Prince prepared to turn away
Our girl knew what to do
She slipped her hand into her pocket
and produced the other shoe.