ALBUM in the background, beautiful, serene, but I,
GHOUL, gazing on the yard, scry the unseen in vegetation’s decline,
LOOPY specters and shades superimpose as those lost to me:
STUMP is not a missing tree, but you and my memory of you.
Author: David Wright
Our Geese Lords
GEESE, fierce seeming, yet in the shadows fiercer. They plan
SEIZE of all. Not from trendy narcissism: utter aggression
BEGAT their plans to take us down. Yearly, the Canada geese grow.
MINERs, gate the mines, our retreat in Age of Geese to come.
Light beckons
SUNNY day, enough sleep, reasonable tasks,
DROSS of life remote, ghosts and demons at bay.
SPARK, beauty, lift up, joy, flow over, love, this day.
CHOKE will soon enough broken streets, hurt and hurting people, my own defaults.
Harold in Italy
SHEIK, perhaps of Araby, learned, versed, brings out
VIOLA for an air. Thoughts meander:
LEGAL tangles of his village. Trying to lead wisely makes him
ITCHY. Sweet notes may calm. Time for Berlioz, Harold in Italy.
End Game
QUEEN to the top row signals end game:
BEGET now of history’s tides a great closing.
LEASE on moment, on circumstance, on the known is so short,
QUAKEs the rule. Pockets of calm will be someone’s golden age centuries from now.
Change-proof
AGILE minds twist, dodge, weave, even as conviction seeks to seize.
DETER demands of change: most human trait.
ADMIT not what might force the climb down, the apology, the review, the realization.
VALID, we might admit of other arguments, but true, if we hold it not?
Silly lines
JIFFY—a jot more than a flash. Say alphabet in Greek:
THETA arrives in jiffy, right where Brits have an haitch.
SCAMP steals the i from scampi, tosses it to line 1 as jot.
ACTOR thinks about these lines, thinks delivery cannot overcome some obstacles.
No audits
AUDIT life? Not hardly. Fully enrolled and final bleak.
SKULL, inside thereof, struggles to own the course,
TYING fitfully what happens to its precious rarity:
GONER struggles to grasp gone.
Captains of reduction
TITANs of enterprise cast our time’s longest shadow,
YEAST mixing, rising, baking the celebrated result,
CANON of society: entrepreneur measured as model citizen.
LEAKY, of course, this view: all other worth drained away.
Xmas mehs
SASSY holiday cheer, deep as a shallow puddle,
TOKEN nod to peace drowned by commerce and nostalgia.
PRISM of the season splits our longing into empty beams.
REVUE, noisy, flashy, bouncy, to crowd out low hopes.