Breakfast Meditation
Feeling contrary,
I discard the orange
slices and keep
the rind.
I ignore the clock
and calendar.
I sit in one place
and watch
my mind
meander.
Flight Envy
Those crows know my name
but I don’t know theirs.
They’re geniuses with wings
but gravity keeps me landed
and dumb. No bird is jealous
of my opposable thumbs.
Your Mask or Mine?
At sundown and sunrise,
my shadow is taller than me.
None of us is the person
we believe ourselves to be.
Inheritance
In mirrors, I look
like myself.
In photographs, I look
like my father.
Politics
Dear enemy, I despise
your rage because
it sounds exactly
exactly like mine.
This next poem is a monosyllabic sonnet, a poem of fourteen lines with only one word per line. I first encountered this kind of contemporary sonnet in the work of Sidney Wade. My mono-sonnet poem is an Petrarchan sonnet, a traditional form with two stanzas—the first containing eight lines and the second containing six lines. First created in the Renaissance Era, and popularized by Francesco Petrarca, the Petrarchan sonnet is meant to present a problem in the first stanza and offer a solution in the second. In my poem, I ask a question in the first stanza and answer it in the second.
Haunted
Do
I
believe
in
ghosts?
Only
the
ones
that
I
create
in
my
poems.
To be grumpy, I’ll add that many contemporary poets write poems they claim are sonnets…but they ain’t. Many of those pseudo-sonnets do have fourteen lines, their only concession to the form, but sometimes they don’t even have that! Here’s the thing: a sonnet has rules. And you gotta follow the rules to call it a sonnet. That said, you can experiment with the rules, as I’ve done in many ways over the years. But my experiments still have strict rules that strongly echo the strict rules of traditional sonnets.
Eucharist
The grounds
are the body.
The water
is the blood.
You name it
coffee.
I name it
magic
and serious
joy.
My Big Brother Remembers
The night they wheeled
Mom’s body out of the house,
he sat by the front yard gate.
Seven years later, he tells me
that a thousand mosquitoes
bit him but he didn’t feel one.
Benedictions in an Emergency
The drowning man loves his breath.
The borrower loves his debt.
The insomniac loves his rest.
I still love the ones who left.
The next poem is a Shakespearean sonnet. Yeah, no pressure to perform here! Among other formal considerations, this type of sonnet relies on the Volta, the last stanza that is meant to be a rhyming couplet. This couplet “plays a pivotal role, usually arriving in the form of a conclusion, amplification, or even refutation of the previous three stanzas, often creating an epiphanic quality to the end.” My Volta has a slant rhyme that employs the same vowel sound.
Social Contract
Driving, I trust
the unseen
people piloting
their cars
as they travel
toward me
from the opposite
direction
on this two-lane
midnight road
where the only
illumination
is their headlights
merging with mine.
Climate Change
I
caught
these
salmon
messiahs
and
they
promised
they’d
swim
forever
wild
or
not.
Flight Envy