24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
Sun setting in the evening
A raincoat on its hook
Steam rises from a pot in the kitchen.
There are jars of tomatoes within.
The frogs beneath the tomato vines croak,
their chorus in perfect harmony
with the children as they play.
The mystery of Summer.
It rained today.
Not the nice kind of rain.
Hot summer rain that steams
And bounces when it hits the pavement.
The frogs were in full voice
In the hackberry trees.
My sister captured a dozen last month
and walked to the park to release them.
They are loud.
I can still hear mine now
Through a closed window.
The two jars I tied to the fence
To measure precipitation
Showed two inches.
The garden will be happy.
Maybe I will go to my sister’s house
This evening and take her some tomatoes.
8/5/17 7:18pm
Little
I find you splintered in the evenings
Your jars of swirling soul stacked on the shelves
Disheveled and collected like coins or china dolls.
In the steam of redeeming creatures,
You’re the feature,
Most accentuated by mirrored glass,
And priceless heirlooms.
Your children line up single file on the page
take the stage as they curtsy and bend at the hip.
Cross my heart and kiss my elbow,
if I fall,
you’re coming with.
You’re the mystery of what crawled underneath the floor boards.
You’re the sum of the words,
that made the pen stronger.
we went to the sugar mill
with cameras instead of raincoats
to take pictures of the evening storm
a rare occurrence in Colorado harvest season;
trusting that the tomato and tomatillo plants she had untangled earlier in the day
could fend for themselves
while we played like frogs in the rain
and took pictures of our favorite landmark,
a mystery we’d only ever seen from the outside,
a three dimensional experience
that neither camera nor poem can every capture
Frogs don’t chirp this
Strangely silent evening.
Not a peep from my tomatoes
Struggling to please me
More than last year’s jars
Of deep red succulence.
Less steam today.
The desert deluge passed into Texas
And we didn’t see a drop
Peculating for dry clay.
Children sometimes play
And cry, and scream
From the yards next door.
But not today.
No. This silent eve, all but a timid
“Shrip” punctuates the stillness
Like any mystery elbow
In every crowded subway.
Dear Mr. Whippy
VCS
Mr. Whippy is ganging up on me
With his gang of thugs
And his alphabets
He hems and hrumphs and I know
He knows how to rap knuckles
With that stick
He keeps telling me
That Diacritacal marks come later
First learn to make the lines
‘But,’ I protest, ‘I fear that
My pronunciation is quite off.’
He sucks in his mustache and his lips disappear
Underneath his disapproving
But very discerning over-lip hair
And when John Dee
Makes his foot notes
In another tongue
I know that Mr. Whippy will translate for me
But with many a disapproving air
At kids these days
Who aren’t taught ancient Greek
And barely read Latin at all
How remiss my classical education
He will groan between making marks in shorthand
(Another dying art! Ah, why don’t they teach
the children shorthand?)
Dear Mr. Whippy, I fear of opening
The door of every room of learning
My brain is only so big
And I haven’t read all the classics
My education is appalling
Why bother to read them at all
If not in their native tongues?
It’s with dragging feet that I carry my notebooks
And my tomes
To Mr. Whippy’s door
And hope he won’t berate me
I fear my head will explode
If I try to learn any more!
As evening turns to night,
the fireflies come out to play,
as do children, their mason jars in hand.
But in my distopian world,
firefly-hunting kids are a mystery,
because it’s the children that glow in Steampunkland.
(Prompt: Choose 5 words.)
There once was a rule of 10.
It counted our numbers. It numbered our streets and ordered our money.
We learned it again and again.
But that changed last night during my quiet, sweet slumber.
Now we go as far as 4–no more, my honey.
0, 1, 2, and 3.
Will somebody please help me?
My bank account is messed up.
I can’t find my home and
It’s all because of some mathematical louses!
There was mystery in her raincoat
The one meant for evening
The shade of tomatoes in full summer sun
Yet in darkness it took on a different hue
One of steam and passion
As if fire was escaping every seam
Thank god it was raining
The fusion of action must be realized in the historical knowledge.
This incomplete mythical world regulates the irreversible power of time.
Only the negation of culture can preserve its level of culture.
The spectacle subjects man to his true reflection…
The spectacle demands passive acceptance…
The spectacle unifies a great diversity…
Emancipation from manipulation,
in clinical charts of schizophrenia,
An understood abuse of the world vision.
Expressions improve. With a completely different theory. A false consciousness of critique.
We begin in the slow and intangible formation.
The social appropriation of time, itself, above cyclical time.
Eternity is internal.
The entire cosmic order is in fact realized within its frontiers.