The men blaze the trail
boldly go forward
willing to risk
to achieve the destination.
And so today
mallard male zips across the highway
boldly flapping, barely
missing the VW missile
travelling 100 km/hr.
Not so fortunate his lady friend
flapping five feet behind.
Ladies
sometimes it is unwise
to blindly follow your mate.
She smells the metallic tang
iron
copper
inhales the essence
life
death
dreams the future
rock
paper
scissors
blood.
.
Little symbols of death
endings
passing of time
gold and scarlet
carcasses
of summer
raked into a pyre
that grows
and grows.
But the voice of death calls
to the child in all
to live with leaping joy
and laughter
mocking loss.
Rolling in the death of summer
welcoming what comes
next.
My father age twenty-five.
his desires divided,
stood in line with naked men
waiting for the army to welcome them.
They listened to his slow, weak heart,
and said he’d stay home to do his part.
My father age twenty-five
managed to stay alive.
While his friends went off to foreign shores,
at home he built bombers for the war.
His friends returned broken and stayed,
with their damaged mates from their brigades.
Dad was whole and grieved the loss
of friendships torn by life or death.
On the decades rolled
and now each soul
who stood entwined within that line
is gone, save dad, whose slow, frail heart
turned out to be his strongest part.
Dad thinks back upon that line,
and celebrates birthday ninety-nine.
You stand against the
wall, arms crossed, sardonic smile
immune to laughter.
.
You’ve seen darkness that
they can only imagine,
and you are hardened
.
from the admiration
of flirting gazes because
your heart is cold,
.
Frozen by bad maternity
and noncommittal
paternity.
.
Their bad judgements burn
within your heart until
destroying misery
.
means destroying
everything you should love,
innocent or guilty,
.
and then it means
flash firing your future,
scarring your life upon ours,
.
like a victim of
Hiroshima’s bombs whose life
vanishes in an
.
instant, leaving only
a silhouette, burnt white
on blackened walls.
.
.
I’m still processing the recent murder/suicide of a former student. The idea of an image being frozen in memory by tragedy called to mind the silhouettes created in Hiroshima when people’s shadoes were left, though their bodies were vaporized. While at first glance a free verse, the poem has some form: each triplet stanza follows the haiku syllable count (17 syllables per stanza) to reiterate this idea.
You’re dead.
My head
a kharmic muddle
I mull upon
morality,
your despair,
a pall
wrapped ’round
mortality.
You’re dead.
You’re dead.
You’ve bled
a carmine puddle
that pooled and
dripped down
the road,
drained
under my door
and into
my head.
It gets better.
Whatever pressure
is crushing you,
whatever frustrations
are tearing you apart,
will end.
Permanent solutions
to temporary problems
are a waste
of who you could be.
Don’t take drastic actions
when patience could prevail
and provide purpose
for the brilliant future
you deserve.
Whatever burdens you,
buries you,
bullies you,
will end.
Call for help
It’s here.
Hold hope in your hands.
Give your future a chance.
Trust time to release you
from pain,
not death.
.
.
In an exercise of hope, I wrote this in present tense, though it is a letter to a brilliant young man who once sat in my class room, and sadly did not trust time: so much potential, crushed by despair, frustration and anger. I am mourning the loss of his shadowed light in our world. It only needed time for it to shine brilliantly, but he did not wait to see.
It wasn’t one
to grab you so tightly that my fingers turned white
and to kiss you until my lips bled in bed at night.
It wasn’t one
to dream it could possibly be me and you
or to fight to make it true.
It wasn’t one
to fill every day with our love year after year
then to fight as days filled with fear.
What was one
was that your body betrayed us
and you’re riding off into the sunset
without me.
.
For David & Julia
I frequently use the Darwin Awards as a prompt for writing in my class room (and as object lessons for the students who may be inclined to travel similar roads). For those of you unfamiliar with the Darwin Awards, they are given posthumously (smirk) to those who have improved the human race by checking out of the gene pool.
This one is a case in point. This is NOT fake. This is actual security camera footage of an impatient man removing himself from the gene pool. Please note the clear glass inserts in the elevator doors. Oi vay.
.
Shawn L. Bird 