While packing groceries into car, a receipt blew underfoot

The Receipt

While packing groceries into car

Underneath a security lamp

I wouldn’t have bent down

Without noticing the scrawl

A desperate wide-eyed receipt

Blowing crumpled underfoot

Along the asphalt ice

In the parking lot of winter

A sorry scribbled line of who

And two of reminisce

Penned curves of a woman

Erratic slants undotted i’s

I note the purchase

Two lines printed calmly

Same price.  Pharmacy

Thank you for your patronage

My grocery bags loaded

Behind the wheel of an investigation

Does one retain this receipt

Or let it blow?

Does one search a parking lot

Random cars for one in tears

Or a napper?  Wondering what if

I start my engine

Sometimes, even so

We start our engines

In parking lots, accelerate

And let it blow

Drafty mess of mind finds clarity in poem. Writers from the stacks lend charity advice.

Consider Bowing from the Granite Cliff

   With apologies to William Blake and Pablo Neruda

To see the world in a slice of toast

   Hold infinity in a bite of stone

And eternity in an egg

Yet, in the living room, monotony

   In the pants of college town, burn

In the head, a faint and clumsy whirr

What catalysts were in the glowing mind

   Each chamber loaded large and packed

Expansiveness of space loud whined

O species dumb and couched

   Your fathers’ mothers' cursing gods
Drilling further into the hot core

O irrevocable river of things

   We cannot bend your course expanse

Burst your banks and flood the land

Look out from where you’re sitting still

   Expand the davenport of devout think

Consider bowing from the granite cliff

     First stanza, adapted from William Blake’s "Augeries of Innocence," 
     written in 1803, from his The Pickering Manuscript.  An augury is a sign or omen.

     Line 13, from "Oda a Las Cosas," from Pablo Neruda's 1954 book, Odas Elementales. 

For those who suffer from schizophrenia. Roughly 50 million worldwide.

                

Do Not Judge the Owner of Stained and Crooked Teeth

Do not judge the owner of stained and crooked teeth

He may be free from suffering and experience peace

May the mind that occupies my trill cold cranium

Concoct that same round quality he may know wide

From calm and heart, full as pods with seeds of maybe

Of monks or Victorian adventurers from church to trail

Of mahoganied Royal Geographic Society lure

Forget about regret, loneliness, the desperation of hurt

Forget Freud, discussing the heavy burden of Can’t Know

The underbelly of insects when shocked/afraid to die

Women, hopeful, bellies ripe and sunlit upon. Poems

Spilling into the stream of canyon where carved enigmas

Like Havana’s jazz, sequoiadendron giganteum stands

Words crooned confidently through chambered branches to

Optimistic gardens of sky where amniotic sacs loose floods

Philanthropists, fresh fruit and conscientious objectors

Fan firestorms of past where peace evolved.  Men:

Ascetics in their thirst, fed lame birds til they grew stuffed

Under thunderheads by the riverstones and reeds

Walloped by rain ‘til their down degenerated into internet

My teeth have fallen out, kicked away, I’m scared

All I’s.  All me’s.  Bald spots.  Why are they snickering?

Where is the poor man now?  Being born upstairs with rags

This is the part of the poem where I ask you the question

Yet you’ll never respond, reader.  Never respond

                  But this is where you pause, and move on

How the flesh while strawberry picking

How The Flesh

Through our toes, the slip

And grit of organic muds

This evening among strawberries

You are in your row, alongside

Studying a berry in your palm

How the flesh glows red and gives

Will its teardrop underside

Fit the open lips

As you turn it toward sky?

In your bending, ripe and green

Your breasts drip to touch

Upon the tips of grasping leaves

Will you hold me, dirty

As the sun dips pink

At the end of our rows?