Marcin Strugalski

Jul 2022

Thomas W Case

He rolls like the
river,
always on the move.
I said,
"What are you afraid of boy?"
He said,
"Nothing; I just can't stay still."
I said,
"They got meds for that."

It's in my bones, I gotta
keep going.
Knap sack...no sack,
don't matter, just me and
those highways.
I said, well, it cost you everything;
your house, your wife,
don't you want to settle
down sometimes?
Nope, he said, as he turned
his back and headed west
towards the desert.
His face to the sun.

For my brother

Marcin Strugalski Jul 2022

importance

What is important and what more.
It depends on where you are.

A branch is wrapping the mother.
And the mother is weaving the nest.

The season of birds in the tides
and estuary of the perennial river
with a constant stream.

A spring
to grow up to. Upward
the only journey you have made.

But it has already happened.

The point
moved on the map

and the well, where
you got your fingers wet.

Oct 2021

Thomas W Case

Poetry is my Loving Wife

She rubs the ache from
my back, as the
morning sun
breaks through the
blinds.

She gently kisses
my lips in the
long hot summer,
and brings me
piles of leaves in
the fall.

She doesn't smash my
fragile-glass ego,
nor leave me wanting
in the night.

She births me
hundreds of
children that live
forever.

And she stays young,
while I grow old.

Oct 2021

William J Donovan

Cheap Wine and Poetry

Cheap wine and cigarettes
    classical music on a tinny
    sounding radio in a garret
    writing poetry to other
    lost souls in Boston and
    Southie and Sommerville
    and anyone who ever lit
    a candle for lost souls.

    We poets die each night.
    Our poems are lost in waves
    of cheap wine as we surrender
    to night's promises of a better
    tomorrow. Another chance to grab
    the brass ring on wooden horses.

    We wake with scraps of paper
    bearing witness to last nights
    binge of accidental brilliance.
    We stitch them back together
    best we can and offer them as
  poetry to anyone who cares.