Category: Poetry

Bring me vast riches – not little things

like diamond rings, or fame or wealth

or kingdoms’ keys, power, glory.

Who needs such things?  Bring me

memories of jubilies, love and joy

and families.  You know where to

find them, tucked away in treasure

chests where those who shared them

went to rest.

Cut-paper couples eat blue-plate specials at Formica tables –
spirits steaming from their coffee cups – in the dead of winter,
sky a shroud. “Long ago and far away and when you wish upon
a star and …” Chalk white light makes ghosts of their shadows.
Apparitions crowd the counter, huddled from a grim world of ice
and rock. “Wish I may and wish I might and once upon a time …”
I bundle back into the blizzard, bowed against the swirl, where
fallen angels dream of sorrow.

Those truth turns, watch the spins,

as you plummet downhill, this way

and that, amidst blinding whiteness.

It’s all a freefall once you jump.

The goal is bliss.

You race for it, precarious,

through the twists and bends,

which come at you, pell mell,

without rhyme or reason.

Headlong is the only direction.

The challenge is Olympian –

trying to get to the end of the

slalom between love and oblivion

without breaking your neck, heart,

soul, spirit.

Wipeout threatens each negotiation.

Right back at him and whatever it was
went right through him, body and soul.
The feeling was a sensation of falling.
With the falling the dull pain, as always,
came back into his head and it was an
effort just to breathe. Lonigan walked
slowly, paused often, his father’s winter
dress coat flapping around his legs, his
fists pushed deep in its pockets.
He felt like a ghost in a dream, as the snow
swirled around him along the drifting streets,
a shadow on the loose with no one to claim
it. The days seemed a maze of make-believe
since his discharge. The shadows of his past
seemed dislocated from his present. The
present seemed a shadow of whatever
state-side was supposed to be. Shadows,
snow swirls, ghosts of dreams …
At the Celtic bar, Lonigan slipped in from
the cold. It was still early in the day and
the bar was all but empty – just a few other
jobless Joes sipping pints in the semi-dark,
everyone avoiding each other’s eyes.
“Any luck, lad?”
Tommy slid a pint in front of him as
Lonigan sat at his corner stool.
“Not this round, Thomas.”
Lonigan pulled the rumpled job section
from his suit coat’s pocket and laid it
across the bar.
“Then this rounds on me.”
Tommy tapped the mug.
Circles round no goes, words like loosing
lottery tickets, any AD a possible, every
life negotiable…
“I am a soldier of misfortune and”
Lonigan scribbled on the margin of the
newspaper, as he browsed through the help
wanted listings.
“I fought that holy war on the desert sand.”
He sipped his pint and searched his fate.

Bible in hand, along the devil’s boulevard

I make my stand.  Shoulders back, jaw set,

cross around my neck, I grin as Satan’s

sinners sweep past, daring the carnival of

tainted souls to tempt me into evil with

their heretical talk about family planning

and the use of birth control, with their

blasphemies about global warming, the need

for higher learning, which could only lead

to socialism, about equal rights and racial

mixing, same sex marriage and other

abominations, like gay acceptance and

higher taxes on the job creators, the unholy

continuation of  the EPA, FDA, Medicare,

Medicaid,  and the ungodly end of our

just wars and crusading nation building.

“Bring it on.”  I dare them.

This poem has been approved by Rick Santorum.