Venus Looks Downrange

As she lowered herself

Onto me, she took

A sharp breath and held it,

The way a marksman waits

Between heartbeats before

Pulling the trigger.

Venus on a Tile Floor

She emerged from the shower

Flourishing her towel,

The cape of a matador

In the heart of a warm

Spanish afternoon.

A Walk Through the City with an Invisible Bear on a Chain.

Listening for rain, like a kid on Christmas
waiting for the hooves of reindeer
on the roof. Please Santa, bring me
some lightning wrapped in a bow.

Thunder, the sound of a storm getting its license
to drive wet and loud, out of sight of the clouds
who now question the decision to give him the keys.
His friend the wind will lead him to trouble.

By mid-August, the sun seems a little older,
yellowing like the edges of an old photograph.
A scattered few leaves change colors --
in the mirror, the greying of my own hair.

Aging Bachelors Argue about the Thermostat

Smell fresh rain in the dark of the evening.

Brother Heat said "Oh, alright. I'll give you the night,

Brother Rain replied "Damn right you will".

Ozone and minerals rise in the steam
air and stone vaporized by lightning,
and the matter laid to rest until morning.

Jumping the gun a little for Poetry Thursday this week. Re-working a Facebook posting, maybe some good will come of this eventually.

Have I ever told you about the time...?

After the hail storm

turned the yard into a sno-cone,

The moon painted the whole world gold

like a carnival ride at rest.

When the tree frogs sang

over the sound of traffic,

the lightning seemed so far away,

Like a story a friend used to tell.

Putting up some older poems

I thought I might blog a few pieces that are older and have been in circulation for a little while now. My thanks go out to the editors who saw fit to publish them.

D

Blunt Force Trauma (Published in The Legendary Oct. 25, 2011)

Blunt Force Trauma

Nothing focuses the mind
like a good ass-kicking.
In bed afterwards, internal organs
re-arrange themselves inside the body.
A bruised spleen tickles, an exquisite
organ in its movement, second only
to the clitoris in provocation.

Granddaddy killed a cow who had turned
her uterus inside-out calving. Stove in her skull
with the back side of an axe. The calf survived;
nursed by a sharp-boned Holstein cow.

16-year-old boy half-way
ejected from a black Pinto
rolling down an embankment.
The police towed the wreck
to a garage only three blocks
from the funeral home. We gawked
past in awkward high-school neckties.
Ours was a small town.

Throw ten thousand punches
into the wooden man dummy, then
go out to eat dim-sum. A chopstick
dumpling is slick and heavy
as a new-born world.

Even after the divorce,
she still sets mouse traps
in her kitchen on occasion.