The First Sunday of Advent

A calling-crow-cold sky ceilings the world,
Lowering the horizon to itself
All silvery and grey upon the fields
Of pale, exhausted, dry-corn-stalk summer

The earth is tired, the air is cold, the dawn
False-promises nothing but an early dusk
As calling-cold-crows crowd the world with noise,
Loud-gossiping from tree to ground to sky

Soon falling frosts and fields of ice will fold
Even those fell, foolish fowls into the depths
Of dark creek bottoms where dim ancient oaks
Hide darkling birds from wild blue northern winds

Crows squawk of Advent disapprovingly,
As Advent-autumn drifts to Christmastide
When all the good of the seasonal year
Then warms and charms the house, the hearth,  the heart.

How Lovely Not to be in Jail Tonight

How lovely not to be in jail tonight
And have to share a small and smelly space
Under an eternal fluorescent light
With a dude who don’t like yer race or yer face

How grand to have a bed that’s enough
With sheets and pillows and blankets all clean
And not a bare mattress sour-stained and rough
Against a wall of cinder blocks in green

And howlings from a soul who has lost life’s fight -
How thankful not to be in jail tonight

After Thanksgiving - We Are One Debris

A paper napkin with a turkey on it
Discarded outside by an errant child
Culturally appropriates among the leaves
It seems to want to join its fallen brothers

Raw and natural in their native state
In multicultural deconstructions
Like, you know, all spiritual and stuff
Becoming one existential leaf-mold

Filtered through November’s hipster glasses
A paper napkin with a turkey on it

Thanksgiving – Places for Everyone

Somehow there are places enough for everyone
A tectonic shifting of tableware
A tsunami of saucers, plates, and bowls
The good Thanksgiving and Christmas settings

A rare bottle of Chateau du Supermarket
Gallons of iced tea, and soda for the kids
So many at the children’s table this year
And who will now sit in Grandfather’s place?

This year he dines at that Table in Paradise
Where there are always places enough for everyone

Chris’s Little Shop of Sonnets

O sing of gasoline, **** oil, and grease,
And chemicals too, incorrectly stored,
And may these toxic wonders ever increase
In service to Harley, Chevy, and Ford

O sing of tools, milled from wood, steel, and brass,
Aluminum, copper, even bits of string,
For forming function, volume, shape, and mass
In cylinder, piston, rocker, and ring.

O sing, old radio, those Beale Street Blues
In tune with that engine, and make it smoke,
Shake that rusty icebox all full of brews,
In Chris’s cave of motorized Baroque.

Sonnets and workshops are messy (it seems)
because
Iambs and wrenches build truth out of dreams

Borodin’s  "On the Steppes of Central Asia"

Lost in a remote province of the mind
A youth attends to the cheap gramophone
Again: On the Steppes of Central Asia,
A recording by a mill town orchestra
Of no repute.  But it is magic still:
While washing his face and dressing for work
In a clean, pressed uniform of defeat,
For ten glorious minutes he is not
A function, a shop-soiled proletarian
Of no repute.  Beyond the landlord’s window,
Beyond the power lines and the ***-holed street,
He searches dawn’s horizons with wary eyes
For wild and wily Tartars, horsemen out
To blood the caravans for glory and gold.
A youth greets the day as he truly is:
A cavalryman, a soldier of the Czar,
Whose uniform is stained with victory.

“Thank You for Being
Such a Valued Customer”

From the Satellite Provider

And, oh! Have we got a deal for you!
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We know you’ve paid, but you’re still overdue
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Which ought to be included anyway
We’re the worst service in history’s annals
We fu(dge) your contract almost every day

And

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