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13thWR
DRESS CODE
Barefoot and grubby, pants half-latched,
rubbing a stubbly chin, he leaned off
a By-water stoop, "I dress like that sometimes."
I bounced back, "And I dress like that sometimes."
A philosopher, he replied, "We all go naked
to the grave." Walking by swiftly,
I observed, "But some have more tattoos."
THE SNAKE HAD TENURE
Beginning in the beginning there was the Word,
and the Word was God, and there was no writer's block
and no taking the Lord God's name in vain. The sentences
flowed like milk and honey across the pristine, promised
page, and metaphors and similes flowered, and hyperboles
and poetic license brought forth fruit, and all was good.
And there was perfection in the Garden of Creativity
until the woman, tempted by a professor of literature, ate
of the fruit of criticism and brought to the poet sour
grapes of "the yard needs mowing, the trash taken out, why
don't you get a job?, my mother was right." Pissed, God
covered the Tree of Immortality in a dense fog and evicted
them. The poet withered at a dip-shit government job. Under
his breath, he muttered "goddamn" a lot. The woman
complained monthly for twenty-nine years about the cramps.
With ten more years till retirement, the poet in his cubicle
read that the professor of literature was caught flagrante
delicto in a public toilet with a hermaphrodite, pubescent boy
and a Stephen King novella. Inspired to write a poem,
the poet read on and thought, who would want to live forever.
- John Cantey Knight