24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
I get tremors when I am near you
Your cinnamon colored jacket makes my heart beet faster
Feeling all elbows and knees, awkward like a preteen when I look into your eyes
Buckets of love feels,
emit from my carport car radio about you and make me smile
Thinking of you evokes images of elks dancing gracefully
Or lightbulbs shining in the dark
You are my Bayou, I love you.
The smell of cinnamon takes me back
to the baking day we had before you left.
I climb atop an overturned 5-gallon bucket
to reach the top shelf in the carport
and the crate that holds your belongings.
Tremors visit my hands as I don your favorite jacket,
fold my arms across myself in an empty hug
and trace the outline of the heart patch on the elbow
as I weep.
A liberal and
a vegan jump off a cliff
to see who will hit
the ground fastest. You wanna
know who wins? SOCIETY!
(A tanka is a five line poem with a syllable count of 5/7/5/7/7. I can’t take true credit for this one as it was adapted from a joke just overheard from my old friend Bubba!)
All l hear is a crazy thought
Replaying over and over
In my head
In my head
All l dream is undecided
Written in greylead
With a rubber handy
With a rubber handy
The future dances,
all halls and plans
I will catch it
I will catch it
Words in the Bayou
Watching you discard the raw beet left from dinner
I pull my jacket tighter closed against the bonfire smoke
To dispel my tremor from this October evening
Do you recall our last night upon the bayou?
Walking hand in elbow in the dusk
Our front porch lightbulb growing faint
Scent of cinnamon wafting on the breeze
The rain began as though pouring from a bucket
Calling elk broke the silence between us
As we ran back, laughing, sheltering in the carport
(Prompt: Use this list of ten words. Please pick at least five of them to use in your poem. If you want to use all ten, please do so. Words are: beet jacket tremor bayou elbow lightbulb cinnamon bucket elk carport)
Her favorite jacket is stained beet red,
The same crimson that is running down between her fingers
As everyone around her stares in tremor.
At this point, the color is enough to stain a bayou,
flowing down to her elbows as she runs to find cover.
Unable to find the switch to the bathroom lightbulbs,
The walls turn red in horror;
That is the last time she eats a bucket of cinnamon strawberries –
Her favorite treat –
Under a blazing carport in the middle of summer.
Leave them to the elks.
Athena the Bischon was a wild dog.
We bought her partly to keep our old dog Cappy
From growing old too quickly
And the way she played with him did keep him young for a long time..
She would chase and run through his legs barking and snapping
Showing herself as Athena the wild dog
She tested her 15 pound body against the
80 pound body of our older Golden Retriever
One time we took her to our friend’s house
And then we went to a movie theatre, leaving her and the other dog home alone
Just to show that Athena was a wild dog
She opened the refrigerator and ate hamburger
She was a great and crazy hunter too, rooting out the homes
where baby rabbits lived
and attacking the mothers and babies
But that was just Athena’s nature as a wild dog.
Humble artist, shine your light on
the world of worlds.
A fashion show in all its ceremonial glory,
Preaches about the encroaching
deadlines of life.
Poised for a wedding,
captured and still,
detail makes beauty.
View the tiny marks,
tails upon tails.
Of questions and answers
“Why do we do it?”
Amongst the chatting crowd,
between rooms five-hundred to now,
I stand on the shoulders of
a man, who I know;
Yet, I cannot trust to lead me
through unscathed.
I am carried up above, black light,
eating my molecules
above the worlds, beyond the gods