this precious rickshaw
hiccups

it jolts at slightest expressions
of the roads' flat faces
hick!
and my stomach wobbles up
like an astronaut made of jelly
bounces against the diaphragm
disturbing the cuddly lungs and
the lattice pancreas wince
hick!
the sour liver curses and
noodle intestines startle and then
grumble
and the swish slosh slosh
of my kerosine blood
is light and jumpy
in the ancient pipelines of flesh

my hands unlearn
unlearn
they are chubby preteens
then hesitating littles
now my handwriting
is an infant walking
hick!
crawling
hick!
this wash-machine ride
with an inferno of April breaths
hick –– hick –– hick!
my little dog-heart
shakes
its fur all ruffled and spiky

The very thing
I seek for hope
is robbing me of it.
So I drink more;
Surely, this will
do it.
I become more
hopeless,
degradation of the
mind sets in.
I'm sunk in the mud
and despair.

Oh hear me now
dear world at odds…
Bare witness individual ethnic mobs…
Take my words both mythic and literal,
your walls of Eden are hardly impenetrable
Open up your heart my long lost friends,
give peace and love a new way in…

COVID

I am thrown pieces of virus's
scalding puke that took me
down into the warehouse
of lost memory.

My head shakes for the tears
which pour from hollowed eyes
the lack of simple names,
numbers and the wrinkled
lists of my failures.

I am overthrown by my own
mystery.  My long list of
minutiae trips me.  I am
unconscious.  Nothing
that is me is the cling on
that is all I have or am.

Covid rakes my mind taking
with with it the night in the
hospital.   The nurse who,
I am told, joined me when
her tasks allowed.

It is too much  To be so
erased until you have to call
the bank and plead for your
self in the numbers behind
the buttons which charge
our lives with permissions.

I sent my self on a journey
to sound the deeps of my
sorry mind.  I cannot know
the contents I do not know.

I am forced into redundancy.
I repeat names
of people and things I cannot
hold. There is no place at the
table where I presided before
the colorless spread of sickness
took up residence in the days
of my 75 years.

I am wiped on the arm of
illness.  I sneeze at the
passwords that are lost into
the soup of confusion.  You don't
know the shapes of the
sick citizens of my aching
head. The red blood cells
which lined up only to
fall.  

I cannot remember you. I
try to fill in the narrative
of the several weeks
weaknesses.

I am pulled ahead by
you who have loved
me.  I take the minutes
of this experience with
you my listener into
a frail future.


Caroline Shank
4.14.22

green green
like moss beneath Moon
and Moon is lit up, perhaps
half or more or less some little
as leafy litter tickles the street
and a gust
in riot
solitary opens
with a voice of Autumn and
bronze dust body
that in nails and toes
of alleys and houses
sits and sleeps
old lady knitting spiders
and rats
in antique blazers of black
as a car whispers by
swift like a hiss
or a city’s small sigh
that startles the silver-eyed lizards
and they scatter
as wheat breaths away
into into into the browny blue
and gold gold
like cold sun
that beats and licks all noise to fire

and rises, it rises fatly
with the lone gust and the white

flower
then to find myself
flapping the hours
in a garden of weeds

I’d rather be a lone
starfish
on the shore
then to explore
in a sea full of mercury

I’d rather be a lone
feather
floating down the river
then stuck together
on eagles back

I’d rather be a lone
cloud
lying across the sky
then a loud
clap of thunder
rumbling nearby

I’d rather be a lone
head
deep in reverie
then lost in dead
men’s memory