New Little Poems

A handful of new poems which are small and measly, on the whole.

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Drops in a pail

           Plip-plop plip-plop

Dead as a nail

           Drip-drop drip-drop

Gone with a breath

            Le-sigh le-sigh

Gray like a death

            Oh-my oh-my

————

Sonnet

Sadfaced and stale, I’ll swallow some tea
Lonesome and cornered before a gold mirror.
The ghostwords, they sing: oh darling, oh dear –
But I have no voice, no voice singing me.
Face down in arms, I send up a plea:
The lost hours waning and I, plucked with fear,
Sigh ten thousands breaths – oh love monstrous near!
This stone in the gut, this salt in the sea.
Oh sweet-wicked thing that ties up this tongue!
Oh roguish the boy that beats on his drum!
Eight days of the week, I mixed up my head:
I sleep at the table, I eat in my bed.
I look out the window, the moon’s in the sky –
I love him so awfully, I think I may die.

————

An Optimist to a Pessimist

Your boots are sagging in the mire,
The rain falls down in bins.
Your glasses broke, the frame all wreck’d,
The record player spins.

I have some new shoes here for you,
The flow’rs are growing tall.
The prophet’s blindman anyhow,
We’ll waltz, a music hall.

————

Street-corner Song

Lovely windowshops on the quiet street
I buy a penny candy for my sweet
A long way away, a long way away

The county parson, bass-humming a hymn
A light from the church, a swallow stops in
A long way away, a long way away

I pick up a tulip, was dropped on a stair
The whitest of flowers, so lonely and fair
A long way away, a long way away

I talk all the hour and smile at my flower
The birds in the tower wing out of their bower
A long way away, a long way away

————

Monologue of a Lovesick Youth

In the slim hours hanging before me, a spoil of hope makes the heart a finick-bird,
three-toed, the inverted laws of a three-toed world,
where a body at rest does not stay at rest, not hardly at all.
It was a capital show, the movie to-night:
the people moved as clouds in dreams and scarcely spoke aloud into the wind.
But a silence born of winter snow is all the less,
since all the words are frozen things and cannot find a breath, no, even if they live.
Oh to-night I think I’ll spy a star and listen, soft, for them.