3 Poems

Untitled
Late November on a vast expanse
of farmland, and for many miles around
too, the cold is setting in.
The ground is hard and the soil
lies motionless, stubborn, its fertility frozen
by the season.

“I’ll bet…”, thinks the tender of that land,
while kneeling in the icy dirt, stroking
the dead fruits of his labor, “I’ll bet that if
I dug a hole I’d get to China.”
He reckoned it were summer there.
“But they don’t speak my language”,
thought the brown-haired tender of the land.

He knelt some hundred long, flat yards
from his front porch, and the house behind,
and the wife within, where the hearth was
surely warm. His right knee rested on the ground,
and his elbow rested atop his left, and he looked
out in no direction; he tried to see if the Earth
did curve.

In the twilight hours,
The air had filled with too much moisture
for the frigid night to hold, and so the frost
began to form, in the twilight hours, whilst he lay
sleeping in his bed, and knowing that the ground
was slowly, surely, turning into solid ice.

He poked at the surface, stabbed it with his spade; the
stolid ground gave no reply. And thinking it
weren’t any use, he shuffled home, and let out a sigh.












One-Way Dialogue
The world is a series of lights and an array of shadows,
and darkened greens
outside my window.


Why must my life rise and fall
with the on again, off again
cooperation of a computer screen?
*
Machine, O Machine of mine
Won’t you play the song for me?
Let me hear the music.
*
You’ve spared me my autonomy,
now won’t you just please open Word?
*
I cannot function without you.
What am I without you? Nothing
but a sad, confused, and Laptop-less
young man.








Space
I feel like the blazing star
Right at the very center
Of my very own
solar system.

And the planets, and the comets
Revolve around me in patterns
extravagantly complicated, whose
paths I cannot discern. I can’t
begin to comprehend the
meaning of their rotations, either.
The innumerable meteorites, like
so many bread crumbs, burning up in
the orange skies of the planets.

It’s known that they depend
on me,
To provide them with my gravity.
So that they don’t just go spinning off
into the coldness of the cosmos; the vast
and ceaseless blackness, where there is
no signpost.

But they do not appear, lately,
to condescend to notice me, as they go about
Their annual acrobatics

Too absorbed, they seem, with
their own atmospheres these days. We have
our own storms, and our own cataclysms
they’d say.

Well hereby, I resolve, from now on
to tell the celestial bodies
that lie within my orbit
just how I feel. No longer
will I share my thoughts
with lifeless asteroids