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Month

May 2019

Look Up in the Sky

Look Up in the Sky

 

Skinny jeans

Yoga pants

A fascination with boots

Tight clothes on both genders

All we’d need are capes:

Are we trying to dress like

Superheroes?

 

Is there a signal

Or a red Bat-phone

To call us to our lair,

Prepare certain formulas

Then out into the world to

Save the day?

 

Is our wish

For a fortress, where

Alone or with a protégé

We might know ourselves,

Learn our power,

Understand the Earth

And all its forces

Marshalled to our strength?

 

We want superpowers,

Don’t we?

Of course, we do

And why not

 

Telepathy could solve so

Many problems

And who wouldn’t want to go

Through the day without

Some invulnerability?

 

Our children

Our cars

All the machines we have in life

Everything turned toward

Fighting evil

Promoting justice,

Let all be good

 

All we need are capes

And some of us have these

 

C L Couch

 

 

Amelia Earhart prior to her transatlantic crossing of June 17, 1928

Wide World Photos – eBayfrontback, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36943383

 

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Record-Keeping

Record-Keeping

 

A new page

A blank slate

Shall I say it,

Tabula rasa

So my college wasn’t wasted

 

It isn’t real

And it is

There’s no paper

Or a quill

No bowl of ink for a brush

To make

Beautiful Japanese characters

 

No illuminated manuscript

With notes in the margin

A mischief illustration

Of a supervisor of a monk

In the scriptorum

 

No cutting into tablets

Made of Sumerian stone

Etching marks into the rock

We still try to decipher

 

Who were the scribes,

Who are they now?

Who keeps the records now

Seeds in a depository

To the north

 

The banks, the potential

All the things we were

And might be

Even better

 

The phonograph

The library

Keepers

Whose work we can enjoy

From the originals

 

I have a card

I have a flash drive

I believe in what was

Revel in it now

That’s for today

Tomorrow there’s a plan

Well, enough of one

For jazz

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Leuven, Belgium

 

2

Curmudgeonly

Curmudgeonly

 

I need to switch and place

Bread into the toaster twice

(thank you, Krups, and

the stranger who kept me from

buying the toaster I wanted,

telling me it

was no good)

 

But now I’ve noticed

That the toast comes out

Misshapen (thank you,

Pepperidge Farms, though this

time I mean it), crust

Bubbling away or so it appears

 

I like it

Sometimes I like misshapen

Things: my father tried, I think,

To pick bent-over trees for

Christmas

So that he could make them

Strong, the instinct of

An engineer,

A carpenter,

An English major

 

The heath must be blasted, after all

Or there will be no drama

And Romantic ruins cannot be

So even

Otherwise the outcast will not

Find the broken corner to

Inhabit with all thoughts

Of desperation

 

What if he had left alone

The Christmas tree?

My mother would have tried not

To stand for it

And succeeded:

The holiday should be an

Evened-out affair

 

In a house with so many children,

She was right; a

Democracy of gifts and celebration

To reign like the newborn

King arrived to recognize

 

But the body is not even

On both sides—curly hair has

Taught me that

And it’s fine

It has to be

Maybe being left-handed helps

The army that marched on that side

Fought and won and disappeared,

Vexing the Romans

And giving rise to left as sinister

 

Keep the shapes misshapen

For the love—

 

The half-burnt cookie you might

As well eat now

 

The tattoo where she slipped,

Leaving a twitch on the mermaid’s

Tail

 

The Earth where everyone is not the same

Leaving discovery our happy

Mandate

 

C L Couch

 

 

Joshua Trees (Yucca brevifolia) at sunrise in Joshua Tree National Park: Hidden Valley Campground

Jarek Tuszyński / CC-BY-SA & GDFL, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3466755

 

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Burkina Faso, West Africa

Burkina Faso, West Africa

 

Six were killed there

It should have been a weekend

Free for church

We want to think of Sundays that way

 

We should learn in school

About the capital

Exports, imports

The crops

The official languages spoken there

 

There should be geography of land

Not forensics after

Execution

Sometime some of us might want to go there

Twenty million of us want to live there now

 

C L Couch

 

 

By darrylkeith, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57456988

Dust storm @ Inata Gold Mine

 

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The End Is Near

The End Is Near

 

The Earth has four billion years already

Only one billion remains

Our star will expand one day

(well, over an eon)

And finally we will lose the light

 

Some say it’s tomorrow

Or later on today

(after tea, I hope)

Some engender crime and madness

Pray for it, vote for it in others

If we make it bad enough

The Lord will come to sort it out

After all, aren’t we right

To invoke a

God?

 

God might have other plans

We know God does

God gave us the notion in the first place

Of the notion

That a plan sometimes is good

But don’t program the

Spirit of the

Lord

The

Savior’s not for turning

Not for the to-do list of some kind

Of faithful

 

We should do well

We should do good

Is that so hard?

Evil done for good is, well,

You know

And that’s crazy thinking

More so to enact

 

Thomas Becket knew

Joan d’Arc, too

Listening for God

To follow through

Is mad enough

For virtue

The end is near for valorous

Much better

 

C L Couch

 

 

The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928

 

 

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walkabout

walkabout

 

bildungsroman

coming of age

if this happen later,

we call it a midlife crisis

three score and ten

we want more time for

the journey

we’ve been on, anyway

 

but differently—

might we walk this together?

we are barriered by language

and the need for utterance

but on the inside, there is distance, too

what is willed

what’s autonomic

the bits of meaning that become

our thoughts

we are alone and alone

 

parts everywhere

like a hardware store

(no, won’t say a junkyard

though I like the yard’s aesthetic)

I could say garden

or department store:

the idea is that everything’s in pieces

and there are connectors

 

bolts

screws

boxes in rows

fertilizer

(mulch)

ligaments

and neurons

so everything is disparate

and it’s not

 

if you take my hand when I pray,

the praying’s shared

we can share over distances as well

and when we say we die alone

I wonder

you may wonder, too

everything might go together

so much more than we know

 

c l couch

 

 

Alto del Perdón (or Sierra del Perdón) on Saint James way

Loutre1980 – Own Work

 

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God Loves Ewe

There are harsher things to write about today.  Maybe tomorrow.

As I was working, the song came to mind “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”  I imagine the song will be with me for a while.

 

 

God Loves Ewe

 

God loves the lamb, the ram, the llama, and alpaca

All the cats and dogs

Chickens, too

The duck-billed platypus (is there another kind of platypus?)

Angel Falls

And the Panama Canal

New York City, Moscow, Beijing

Alice Springs, Nazca, Tecate, and Palikir on the island of Pohnpei

Midway Island

Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania

 

God loved the dinosaurs

And maybe somewhere loves them still

God loves everyone who’s come before

Who will arrive today

And go home tomorrow

 

God loves the ewe

And God loves you

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Om Prakash Sethia on Unsplash

Bhubaneswar, India

“Her life lines.”

 

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Junior Classic, Illustrated

Junior Classic, Illustrated

 

I saw an image of a dhow

First time in a comic book when

I was young

Good place to find it—

Looks and words of far-off places

Among them those that don’t exist

For that’s what

Comic bookx are for

And for the youth

In any age

 

A small, Egyptian ship

To carry color, set a story

Spark something in the head

And all longing internal parts that

Want the story

To be real

 

Then, I read slowly

I read slowly now

And for my sins became a teacher

Of all kinds of text

But the text that draws me in

Is

 

Once this happened

 

C L Couch

 

 

Dhow in the Indian Ocean near Zanzibar

Muhammad Mahdi Karim – Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13092508

 

 

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Solacing

Solacing

 

I’m tired, but it’s the kind

Of tired that comes from sleeping for

A while,

Waking up and wondering what time it is

The clouds and unspring-cool help

This along

But it’s not unpleasant disorientation

I know I’ll rise

And this day will happen

 

Coffee and toast,

The closest thing to routine

It seems allowed

A normal day, what’s that?

I couldn’t tell you

I don’t fear boredom but

I fear being dull

Like the poor boy Jack

 

Life should have sharp edges not

For cutting but for

Carving toward brilliance

As if whittling wood could

Somehow make a diamond

 

Nature says hello

Me, too

I hope we both cooperate

I’d like you to have this day as well

 

C L Couch

 

 

(smoky diamond, public domain)

 

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