Midwest Autumn

smell of fallen leaves in air
  like earth crumbled through fingers
blue and white crash of waves on golden sand
  quiet and constant
cool air chills the cheeks and ends
  at wrist of longsleeved shirt

wind carries Friday drums over the hill and past houses
snares, toms, and bass tapping out rudiments and rhythms

I linger there
I listen
I feel
I recall

When People Die

Sometimes
When people die
'Tis enough to say they were ours

No need
For soliloquies
Or elaborate diatribes
One need not be
Good or bad

You see
Only in and of a tribe
Both Jesus and Bel
Need be
ne'er-do-well
So our conscience may all be
Appeased

My Daddy Turns on the Stars

My daddy lays me down at night
He tucks me in and turns off the light
He reads a short story and picks up my cars
And then my daddy turns on the stars

meta

It's 10:20 at night [1/5/2014], and for the first time in many, many years, I felt obligated to write a poem. So, I did. My high school creative writing teacher, Dan Holt, taught me that a poem is not a poem until it is shared with others. I was resistant to that idea then but since understand profoundly. Because of that advice, rather than save electronic files away in the hopes that my children or grandchildren stumble upon them in my personal effects, I am starting this blog. As I have titled the first poem, "Reanimation," I see the blog as a restarting, a rebirth. However, I will occasionally, perhaps, post poems from my youth so that I prove that first post wrong, that I may reanimate some of my dead ends--as they might have been.

bk

Reanimation (01.05.14)

drunk
intoxicated in flesh       in alcohol
devolved in state       improvising in the investment of the masses
controlled by the state
12 years       twelve years gone
I have given my youth to the ages
wasted
poems unwrit

mea culpa
may a culpa
may I
may i