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  Aug 2018 Sharon Talbot
Josh Cooper
Are you a painter of lost shadows?
A drawer of fearful silhouettes of troubled memories.
Do you have a paint brush that loves being diped in deep black ink?
Coz I got pitch-black issues...
And one of it is how bad I want you to dip into my soul...
You will find all the dark ink and paint you need...
Slowly, paint my choked brokenness on paper.
Sharon Talbot Aug 2018
Fingerprints and fibers,
Accumulated talk,
Whispers in the corners,
Bodies demarcated in chalk
On the marble courtroom stairs.
His misery became a pall.
With mourning signs in splattered pairs,
Red flowers on the wall.

All that he had left behind was grief
And powerless rage,
A Tansu chest in high relief,
A coiled brass clock fatigued with age.

Retreating to a white house in Simrishamn,
He’d walk his dog along the shore,
Find sterile clues amongst the sands,
And travel a ferry between two lands.

And now: An experiment! Blame Google Translate for this weird (?) Swedish translation: Please tell me if this is a bad translation!

Fingeravtryck och fibrer,
Ackumulerat samtal,
Viskar i hörnen,
Kroppar avgränsad i krita
På marmor rättssal trappor.
Hans elände blev en pall.
Med sorgsignaler i splatterade par,
Röda blommor på väggen.

Allt som han hade lämnat var sorg
Och maktlös raseri,
En Tansu bröst i hög lättnad,
En spolad mässingsklocka utmanad med åldern.

Att återvända till ett vitt hus i Simrishamn,
Han skulle gå sin hund längs stranden,
Hitta sterila ledtrådar bland sandarna,
Based on the show and novels of Henning Mankell, "Wallander", an existential, chronically depressed detective from Ystad, Sweden, is unable to leave his police work at the office. He alienates everyone and loses anyone who gets close. In the end, he is left burdened with Alzheimer's and tragic memories.

Och resa en färja mellan två länder.
Baserat på showen och romanen Henning Mankell, "Wallander", kan en existentiell kronisk deprimerad detektiv från Ystad, Sverige, inte lämna sitt polisarbete på kontoret. Han alieniserar alla och förlorar den som kommer nära. Till sist lämnas han av Alzheimers och tragiska minnen.
Sharon Talbot Aug 2018
Green night in the middle of the day…
Fire rising to ****** the moon,
Uncle Sam’s praying in my room
And the 8-ball will not say

Why a woman holds a gun
To her husband’s sleeping head;
Does she play or just wish him dead?
An armadillo’s included for fun.

Uncle Sam’s lost his hat in the fire
Maybe that’s why he’s praying.
Not for the country he should be saving
While we are conquered by liars.

I’ve tried to make sense of this before:
Masked fiddlers strum in the conflagration,
Dead books, butterflies and chimps run the nation,
…there is luggage on the floor.

Should I run from the scene,
Or stay and try to fight?
I can’t read my books in the deepening night
And there’s a skull waiting just to scream.

The man sleeps on with a gun at his head
And I see another skull by his side.
It must be a sign saying: “run and hide”.
But why can’t I do it?
There’s no way to get through it,
But I must wake up and fight or I’m dead.

June 1, 2006
This is from a popular group's album cover, reminding me of one of those Dadaistic nightmares you have during a fever...or the state of the nation just before The Crash.
Sharon Talbot Aug 2018
Our Dog Howling at Sunset

At sunset, the dog howls at sirens in town.
If he were snowbound in Talkeetna,
A hundred miles from nowhere,
What would he howl at instead?

I saw my husband trudging through the frost,
His blue jacket half-tinted orange and red,
“I don’t like the way you sound,” he said
As he left, deserting one who was already lost.

If I were a thousand miles from him now,
Listening to the wolves’ mournful cries,
And my beloved shunning me as he does now,
Would I pretend to believe my lover’s lies?

Or, instead, would it be enough to exist
Where the short summer dies on winter’s grist,
And true love’s a dream born on a dreamer’s mist,
And the one to stay with is the one you’ve just kissed?

If I lived in a land so cruel and hard,
Would I be bargaining with my soul?
If love’s short date were but a moon’s silver shard,
Would he be a passing thought, and my son the whole

Of any future we had scattered out on the snow,
Or caught in the rime-bound trees?
Would I see then what I already know—
That his future lies with himself and not me?

As our wolf howls a timeless wail to the air
I can listen and guess at its season.
I can comfort myself it will always be there,
Beyond human hopes, beyond reason.

Far wiser, the black-furred hound, than I,
To sing out his ancient song.
Waiting, watching, as we struggle and die,
Only to pass his wisdom along.

Waiting, hoping as he does for a touch,
He is made to think that he asks too much--
Waiting for a kind word or loving hand--
Wild and alone, in humanity’s bleak land.

A southern writer once lamented the lack
Of courage in humankind,
And suggested we borrow the strength we see
In the branches of an olive tree.

Yet there’s more courage in the dog-wolf’s cry,
Penned out on our city-cropped lawn,
As if he knows the grief of my son and I
When the man we both love is gone.

“Could we not as well” take a lesson from him,
Our wild and loyal friend?
To howl out our sorrow and loneliness,
Though the pain might never end?

Now, in the twilight I hear my lover return,
With no greeting to me, and I burn
For the summer’s newborn passion I recall.
The twilight wolf’s mourning tells it all:

That we never will have what we had before
That love can die just as well as it’s born,
That a child is the only one who restores
What is lost to the lonesome, the wolves, the forlorn.


July 6, 2001
A long-ago falling out and later mended.
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