That Young Man from Nantucket

As filtered through National Public Radio

There was a young man from Nantucket
Whose foot was caught in a bucket
He said with a grin
As he massaged his shin

     “Vers libre is a more affectively responsorial mode of privileging my
      authentic voice with regard to the cultural norms that speak to the
      existential realities of my heritage instead of the mask of the external
      culture that fails to affirm my needs predicated on the living organic
      wholeness of, like, y’know, my own special existentialness, and,
      like, stuff.”

Semester Exam

Fluorescents flicker and fall upon bowed heads
And printed letter-paper, organized
By title, paragraph, number, and line,
Interrogations set in Bookman Old Style

And then words fall, flung bravely to each sheet
As desperate, inky thoughts flailing for breath
While to battered be by split infinitives
Demanding an A, praying for a prom date.

The paper's a mess, one’s mind is in shreds
Fluorescents flicker and fall upon bowed heads

The Dying Romantic Mathematician

“Your trapezoid is vectored to a sphere”
She sighed, “and parallels are polygon.”
“All, all is perpendicular,” he coughed,
“And arcs are so rectangle to sad Pi
Equiangular in the radius
And rhombus has gone Pythagorean.
O canst thou concave the isosceles?”
“Yes!” she coplanared. “Yes!” he gasped in pain,
“Oh, yes, our love is solved for X!"
                                                                He died,
Quadratic equations upon his lips

A Child’s First Safety-Deposit Box

For Kirk Briggs

A dime-store pocket watch that doesn’t run
A tiny magnifier for aiming the sun
A bit of chalk, glass marbles, crayon stubs
A pencil or two worn down to the nubs
A pair of dice gained in a school-yard trade
A cheap pocket knife with a broken blade
A pocket calendar from just last year
A bottle-opener that says “JAX BEER”
A shotgun hull, and little toy cars -
A box is for treasures, not Dad’s cigars!

If You Pick up a Dream

If you pick up a dream, it might explode
Shooting pulses of light into the skies
And winds of words to wheel among the wings
Of truths in flight above a moonlit night

If you pick up a dream, it might explode
Into disasters unimaginable
But realized all the same, in smoking ruins
Of fragile constructs thoughtlessly knocked down

Be careful, then, along your pilgrim road:
If you pick up a dream, it might explode

After Epiphany 3

There will not be a gay bonfire tonight
The outside animals were early fed
And early sheltered in their straw-strewn barn
To chew and low and snuffle through the hours

Then folks withdrew from duties and the dark
Into the house to hang their coats and find
A chair next to the stove; they sigh the time
And mourn the emptiness where was the tree

And linger drowsily over a Christmas book
There will be not be a gay bonfire tonight

After Epiphany 2

The stripping of the tree is almost Lenten
The ornaments gone, only “bare ruined choirs”
Remain, no comfort of carols or hymns
As it is dragged outside into the cold

It almost seems to shiver in the winter sun
Reduced to poverty and then to scraps
Which in the months to come enkindle then
An evening fire after the cows are milked

But not celebrated with festive lights
The stripping of the tree is almost Lenten