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.

Or is that “cliff-ku”?  I have several of these oddities scattered around my archive and will post them here as I find them. Sometimes they lead to longer poems.  You can check out the Vermont-based Poemshape for some of the finest examples of haiku in English.

Telos
By a thorny path, lifetime to a pasture
Fresh

The sun
The sun in me, winter shadows soul
Distinct

Mow
Mow that lawn, scalp those weeds to grass
Facade

A plague
Runs riot, a world runs riot, an old man
Walks

From ten-year-old hunter to ten-year-old Savonarola.  Another sporadic Poem of the Id—revenge in this case–paradoxically in response to perceived agencies of systemic civil and instinctual disorder.  Pot/kettle?

When I was ten so many people were begging for survival
I nipped it in the bud and let imagination work instead
I fed the Warren Court through a wood chipper, as if,
By dream, the red cartilaginous spray would save us.
But really not, and for 30 years I studied where its minds
Came from and ours, in Yale’s best Constitution classes and so forth
And so forth. For 30 years I did, with these brainy termites’ brains
Take up, the slather on and clutter up, in theory’s wiles but
Still in vain to find a wisdom to excel
The simple perspicacity of ten.

The fire lane sedge
Divides the woods
A bending branch unites:
He’s tramped all day
In hunting gear
For something live to take
When a squirrel jumps to,
And crosses there and
Pauses in his sight
And ponders what this
Other is, with shotgun
Proudly aimed—
A boy of 10 is what he is
His Christmas gift embraced
A trigger click from proving
True a killer among men.
But alone so long he shoos it on
As if himself in fate or
The incarnation of a life
Somewhere else a friend.