Why the Children are Yelling 67

they pitch foreign coins and .22 shells, they pile on each other until madness takes an arm and twists it back and the scoundrel howls uncle, they play they love to congregate against our wishes, splash and track November mud into classrooms, pouring their minds into losing their native language deciphering adult talk pleases them, they listen like architects with an ear for secret chambers and fire escapes and drills for active shooters, the kids duck and cover, cower under atomic numbers while the sensible grown ups goose step and holler repent storm capitols with idiot chants, yelling Geronimo they push the grand experiment off the cliff, spittle-lipped screaming at children what to do with their hands put them up, slap cuffs behind back, against wall and still, after all the years the evangels stay perched on their stoops, ravenously pointing down at the least of these, squawking their beastly six-sixty-six _________________________ Writer's Digest November Poem a Day

dVerse: Poetics: 1,2,3…Go!

Cosmetic Damage

all that paper skin circling the eyes 
gives in first, it claws its way 

from the corners as time marches
its trumpets over your dermis

get cool with the crumbling 
temple, or get obsessed

with tighteners and tossed treasure
to see yourself swimming
 
in the fountain at a city square
where women emerge uncracked

surgeons applaud their faces
with dotted lines, marvelous

one suspects it’s a fine line 
between bloom and reborn

no stem-cell serum 
can remove
your scars, which are 
the body’s memory

it’s not like you
can massage a filler
into the crevices and forget
 
the profound sorrow
in a rejuvenated wrinkle

______________________

Friday Writing #204: The most expensive garment

Still Life

mid signature, the ink

disappears, tearing

through the dotted line

surely the lawyers can 

piece together

what I meant, in print

it’s legible, shaken

but my legal name

and hers, I scream

it into the axe

and dried oak

over and over 

it’s not like winter

to wake up and walk

away, the meterologists

count down hours

until the blizzard

it will be a white out 

on the skids

when I pull over, let her out

drive off, rehashing

every time I measured twice

cut once, and fell short

_______________________________

Friday Writings #203: Things you hate

In Umbra

it’s the hours you have
to practice being dead
 
your ears fingering the air
for any feathered scratch

it is how you starve 
for a candle’s 
sweet, close company
a conversation 

with its light interrupted 
by coughing shadow

until the wisps
drift quietly away

the new darkness 
invites you to open 

your eyes to the 
deep earth above

_______________________________

Friday 202: What I love about the dark