My body, your body
Embraced as a passion
Before mind began
To fatten into reason
Aging as we were
With children.
So: for a few years
The sex was good?
Yes, so what?
You never made
Enough money
But enlightened my
Childhood ideals
With only desire, nightly
Calling my bluff
(Ten times with restraints
Bedpost to bedpost)
A woman a hundred times
Better read than you (at least
In Greek myth)
And I will never forgive
You for that: But You!  You!
You forgive me for me!
For projections never
More fearful, never more dire
For a horror, a vengeance
I will miss more than
Earth!     

I sit in my den that needs
Dusting, for four years.
But the dust has become a guest
Or I a guest of the dust,
An accumulated identity
That buries me
With companionship,
That to mop is to murder.

Fall
To frost the grizzly
Land

Pumpkin
Grins a candle
Light

Heat
Survive I beg my
Heart

Crow
Ascends the cold
Moonlight

(Special thanks to PoemShape for haiku prompt)

Sometimes it happens
That way—my friends all
Mad at me.  They don’t
Answer, or if they do
It’s to bait some flaw
Irrevocable I can’t help
Easily the country voice
(“Forrest Gump? Or is this
Karl Childers speaking?”)
Or perhaps a mood
That doesn’t quite match up
To the free help they need
Moving to a bigger house
Or putting together a grill
With a thousand bolts.
Or it might be a milestone I
Overlooked—a wedding party,
A godson’s soccer game–
Because I don’t like crowds
And prefer each player
A buddy of mine, that is,
Prefer to hear them talk
Or age for age commune
By common myth, our
Ancestors’ valor at Gettysburg,
Say, or how globalism sucks.
Yes, age for age, some ageless common bond!
A Reich that really lasts a thousand years
And doesn’t invade Russia
Nor blames the Jews en masse
For Jeffrey Epstein
Would be nice.
Or perhaps I should just
Learn more about soccer… 

My 4-year-old thing was boards
Scrapped from anywhere
(Those palings by the road
Not all of them rot)
And so I’d sort
And sort enough to build
Up and up and up
With rusty, salvaged nails
(As well)
A tree scraper—to my
Height of pride!
Until one day a girl
I’d played “Doctor” with,
Collapsed it, in my absence,
And blamed me for her fall.
The good news:
She later became a trial lawyer
Whose husband, at her suggestion
Offered me $20,000
To build a boardwalk
Up a dune
……………….To their mansion
The labor for which
(I told him)
I’d be donating
In her memory.

Drought outside, one hundred two
A run of these since early June
The crops in gnarls, relentless heat,
The rows of stunted lush ongoing
The sear straight-jacket leaf
To stalk–this I commune
And worse—
A land, a youth
More wizened than me.

Cliff Wordsworth, neo-Confederate, died August 16, 2050.
He was preceded in death by the Anglo-Saxon genome.
He is survived by one patient, loving Jewess friend,
an erratic work history and a few poems he wrote.
His last words were, “The U.S. must go but I blame God for nothing.”

That in Chicago I’m not shot
In Portland I’m not beat
For we’ve a space to be ourselves
To go our separate rucks,
Be it Southern
Duty, honor, discipline
Or New York, for cannibalism,
Yet far enough apart
No one else to blame. 

Eye
Behold a butterfly, wings banter with the
Air

Egg
Stuck to a milkweed and off to Adam’s
Lair

Chew
Voracious caterpillar to bring her back to
Life

Bloom
Chrysalis, humbly, our hope that bliss will
Last

(Special thanks to Poemshape for haiku prompt)

Spontaneously written in one sitting on June 30.  I had been reciting Yeats a lot to myself, mainly “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Second Coming.”  The reader may note a slight poetic license with line 14. 

As bad as it is
For me, it’s only
Too much for you
& so I keep my mouth
Shut really, about all that
& stay mostly to myself
Not to spread it.  One or
Two friends is enough,
With antibodies. It only
Depresses me in others
Who may lack my resources
Of people they love,
A mutation against suicide,
The genius IQ, truly
I am blessed to reconstruct
The contexts of its horrors
Over & over
And somewhat keep control:
An expedient murder here & there…
A concentration camp at the right time…
That leaves me normal
In solitudes of pain
Marching forth.