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I'm just gonna post what I have in here, all together like...
ribbed for your pleasure...




To My Son, Who Grows Too Quickly

It's come to my attention
that, despite my most earnest desire,
you've decided to betray your childhood.
It was your own mouth, whispering bloody messages
on you pillowcase while you slept,
that gave you away.

I wish you'd quit losing your teeth.
Inflation and Chinese Industrial growth
have severely decreased their market value.
Not to mention, the poor Fairies will soon
be constitutionally phased out.

However, since God Himself,
who ages not yet demands we do so,
has willed that your innocent lips be bloodied,
please try to keep it to a minimum.
In this way it should be possible:

Avoid those things which would leave
your mouth impure or corroded.
May I never see smoke curl from your
cherry tongue - neither
from tightly rolled carcinogen peer pressure,
nor from the smoldering devastation
of F-bombs.

These things keep close to your heart.
But whatever you do,
don't forget to floss.

Thanks very much! sweatdrop

Ein Feel Teh Luff... heart

A New England Sunset

His blazing casket was extinguished
as it stretched slowly into the yawning,
disinterested grave. Nothing
but an atmospheric illusion.

As I joined my closest family and friends in
wiping the sudden flash from our minds,
I caught a glimpse of his dearly beloved,
for whom we were really gathered there that day;

her tears in profile were lustrous gold,
cascading profoundly from a grievous and molten spring.
They burned a path down the shadowed valley
of her sunken eyes, illuminating the beautiful
wreckage of her once supple cheek.

Scattering them quietly across the lawn,
as thickly and as quickly as embers escape
a collapsing fire, never once did she reach up
to collect them or keep them in.

As I regained my focus,
hers was off in the distance,
perhaps carried off
on the sails of a northbound ship.

Her fingers remained folded,
loosely clutching a dry handkerchief;
her pain now unabashedly emblazoned
upon her brightly stained complexion.

I honestly believed that its light would be sustained
long after its source sank
traditionally
into the western sea.

I Hate Politics


A pompous despot
muses over his Christmas fire
stoked with the latest opinion polls.
Cheers to another landslide victory!
(and a population buried.)

His steel valor once stabbed lushly
into jell-o battlefields,
(the path of least resistance)
turning mothers into martyrs.
Of course, someone forgot to tell the children,
"There's no crying in war!"

But numbers, despite their best efforts, cannot lie.

His greatest pleasure his greatest strategy:
"The way to a man's heart is through his stomach."
To receive the world on a silver platter,
he was glad to extend his own plate -
conspicuously full.

Winning hearts and minds,
one distended belly at a time.





...and here's an older one, done as a creative final for a British Lit. class,
based on The Rubyiat of Omar Kayaam



Omar's Wisdom Gleaned


O WAKE! And drink the sun's reviving rays!
Imbibe the river sweetly as it plays
across the monoliths of glass and stone
that mortal man has made to call his home:
reflection's caught so quickly in the eye.

Let light dance soft across my lover's face
and fill her eyes upon our next embrace.
But Love! shine clearer still and dull this sun,
that, when life's hard fought toil's finally won,
I might follow her to higher planes.

The garden path she walks upon is warm.
The signs she sees within the world affirm
that beauty springs created from within,
not prone to be destroyed by death or sin;
that vanity's bewailed the most in hell.

For Lucifer does surely rent his face,
appalled indeed by what it has replaced.
The Morning Star stamped out in Righteous Wrath!
no longer knows a rose along his path,
for beauty in his house can take no hold.

So try he must! to turn our Eve to Night,
to sow the seeds of Silence, Sin, and Spite,
to rob the earth of what he sees as good,
to tear apart our human brotherhood,
and plunge the world, through chaos, into war.

So, often Aries' storm sweeps 'cross the plain
To drown the fertile fields in bloody rain
He'll plant his human seed deep in the earth
To grow his shrines of memory and hurt,
the Cross that always signals sacrifice.

For Vanity! his vicious hands employ
in agony, to deconstruct our joy.
Within the Kingdom of a loving God,
Poor Mephisto, forever to be trod
down by what he still has the pride to scoff!


The distant drum is pounding louder still!
The time will come when men have had their fill
of corporal lust and carnal opiate;
Eternal Truth is soon to propagate
amongst the quick and quite amongst the dead.

But Love! Entwine your branches 'round my heart!
Please keep my soul and body far apart!
For when I cease to feel the Winter's sting
I will drink deep the endless light of Spring
and know your touch so absent from the world!

Across the flowing waters I'll be borne
and reach behind the flowing curtain torn.
With love I'll see the souls of humans cured
And through the Gates my soul shall be returned
To Thy Kingdom, coming from above.

So Beauty! held within my lover's smile,
please dwell with me for just a little while.
For God and Time have yet to reconcile,
I'll wait with peace for Love to end its trial.

In all things I have yet to see -
Beginning, End: they're both in me.

Reminds Me of My Mother

Comfort-coated cookies
have no problem-solving sensibility.
No life lesson's gleaned
from a shame-laced lasagna
or chicken a la care.

More dessert to cover his bare, bone-white
plate of shortcomings? Please.
His cup runneth over
with empty glances and
full stomachs.

Margarine was never quite good enough.
Why must he be everything
but her
butter?

I was starting to miss my beloved iambic pentameter rofl

Ode to a Sheet of Paper

I dare to strike my graphite plow to pulp
and render atoms ordered, that my thoughts
might tear the tender tundra and take root
before the stream of consciousness is stopped.

Such risk for conquest is the cost of art!
A million fields fall fallow to the heap
when impotence lays claim to fertile tracts
and words become a worm embedded deep

within a promised land, leaving it old
by leeching life and sucking soil cold.
A single supple sheet that cannot yield
must face the fire with prospects unrevealed.

I take a risk, yet know plain where I go -
a beaten path before me leads my hand,
for I am not the first to rend a sheet
or stare across this vacant loose-leaf land.







How Presumptuous, I!

I'll take my evening stroll,
certain that air will part -
generously allowing me to pass.
(No miracle required)

So sure am I that
solid ground will never
let one molecule of me
slip through its porous padding
to be absorbed by some
upward-reaching root.

I'd never dream that water,
wrought with cupped hand,
might sift through my spinning skin
like a colander, leaving
but a moist palm to lick
as it drips backward from my knuckles.

But why should some Great Arbiter
not loose my walls, tear my membranes,
or close the rippling air?

Cannot He who lights the sun snuff it between His fingers?
Cannot the Editor of History turn His pen and justify?
Cannot He who etched Universal Law in stone also see it smashed -
scattered into the primordial mix from whence it once surely came?

I'll take my evening stroll. Certain.
How presumptous, I!

Upon Witnessing a Condom Being Ejected from a School Bus

It flapped - snagged
on a window clip
rusted since "bussing"
was a threat rather than
a mode of transportation.
("White flight" kicked my funny bone
as I set my windshield wippers on "kill".)

I suppose it was a "rebel banner"-
a thin red middle finger
(ribbed for her pleasure)
wetly wagged at the world
before splashing down
to meet concrete reality
and much harder rubber.
(At least they were still teaching sex
education.)

How like bird s**t (which, of the two,
had more right to be determined "waste")
it hit the curve of my streak-free shine.
(Always right after you get a wash!)
As I swept it aside in tight angles,
I couldn't help but consider myself
"the farmer who cast seed upon the rocks".
(Blashpemey was still learned
outside of the classroom.)

As their flag rode the ridge of my tire,
the kids just sat, stoic - thinking about...
what?
Sure their little wheels were spinning,
but where were they being driven?
(The way of Soddom, Gommorah, Thelma and Louise.)


When I got home,
I sold my stock in "tomorrow"
to some upstart convienience store,
from which I'll probably buy porn later on.
That way, I'll have help
as I habitually fossilze
future generations
upon my bathroom wall.



Chess Lessons From My Father


From the foggy banks of my memory,
a weathered hand still emerges sagely,
landing delicately on the back row of a civil war;
one that underwent
weekly reconstruction
upon a white-black-white-black battlefield.

"See, son, how they used to keep their women?
Always according to her own color
and always next to her man."

In the beginning, wives were to submit to their husbands;
that is, until checks, threats, and advances broke (as they always do)
the wish-sewn strings of domestication.
If anything, a lesson learned early is a lesson learned well.

"Sure you want to move your Queen out, Dad?"
"I got a woman I can depend on!"
"But the King's unprotected..."

Pawns fell like the days and months from
his dime store calendar,
but did he feel them pass?
A woman to depend on...
how could she abandon him there
to stand alone in his back row?

Checkmate.
Father and son in their proper places.
Some things I had yet to learn,
but again my world made sense.
The two lessons I learned that day:
sometimes people have to leave,
and sometimes there's nowhere left to go.