Numbers
Eleven-fourteen
Three minutes past
My time, which is
All ones
But three is for the
Trinity, so I can’t
Complain
The numbers of
Our lives: my dates
In spite of ones
Are rife with threes:
Add up the numbers
Of my birth and now
Divide—there are
Exponents of three
Multiples abound
And I am only one
Of these
Sometimes there’s
Great comfort in
That, in being one
Of these
Pray for Fiji
Pray for Fiji.
I cannot go.
I don’t know how to build or
how to advise others how to do it.
I cannot send money.
It seems so small,
but I can pray.
Psalm 29
a song wanting simplicity
Innocence or stupidity, I want a simple life. I want my books and films. I want to write. I want a few nice things to wear. I’d like to keep my health in check. I’d like to be able to get around, not in an extravagant way. I’d like to quiet my ego by layering it over with love. I’d like a loving life. I’d like a faithful life. I’d like a life in which the Spirit guides me, even if that might ruin all the rest. Sigh, I’d like to follow God.
Bread and Circuses
(after a debate in 2016)
I know I’m not the only one
He yells into the microphone
Dismissing anyone he’s talking to
Sometimes with a literal wave
He wears too-long neon ties
And cannot carry a moment of
Dignity, let alone civility
Has he ever been polite a
Day in his life?
Yet he’s our front-runner
Why? Because he’s got us
Paying for it, and we’re buying
Him, his shtick, his cant
He reaches the mad part of us
(“Mad” in both ways)
He’s catharsis when he’s gone
But we’re acting as if
We want to elect him to stay
Tornado Forms and Passes Through
A tornado touched down here;
That doesn’t happen often
In the Midwest, I used to drive
Underneath funnel clouds forming
Within a sky of green and yellow
Sometimes the tornado formed
Sometimes it didn’t finish
Here there was the locomotive
Sound, and all things went awry
Gravestones lay flat upon the
Ground—parts of houses and
Other buildings rolled over
Discarded stone and memory
Roofs of schoolhouses pushed
Deep inside—the Amish will
Give to municipal authority
A list of broken property to
Be fixed in community, alone
The Red Cross Is here, while
We number what is lost,
Remembering simultaneously
What is to be thanked; for
This was a fatal happening
Yet stolid folk are quick to
Say it could have been much
Worse, because it has—retellings
From the cobwebbed past given
Anew to current, digital media
Meantime the sun remembers
To return to us a blessing now
Many Waters
The ocean’s acidic
Ruining its own reefs
Shipwrecks in the Gulf
Of Mexico merge with
Oil remains from spills
Creating new corrosion
In waves
This is global occurrence
We are mostly water,
After all
epigraph (and then we laugh)
who am I, I do not know
am I you, far down below
do I cheat when I arise
see the world with only eyes
will I rest, when I am done
in a place where we are one:
all things sensed, and with a will
cherish what we might and still
Random
Now
The town that has a gal,
According to Glenn Miller’s band
Has lost that trust in wrecked
Romance; the “sweetest gal”
No longer waits in Kalamazoo,
Does she?
And does he want to explain
Himself? The driver who took
Fares when bouts of shooting
Anyone was done
Silently, she now attends
In another state of place,
Gated from harm
(random shootings in Kalamazoo,
one killer who worked taxi-like)
Delhi and Flint
Pay for water; no water comes
Forth
There is no Moses at the spring
To channel water from an
Ordinary source made
Miraculously (cleanly) abundant
Through divine agency
Flint, a town in Michigan,
Faced with lead-infecting water
For the families and the other
Centers of community
Delhi, the second most-populated
City, now with broken waterways
Facing silent threats of thirst
And starvation and disease
Mis-directed plans, protests
Aggressive, violent
Innocents trapped between;
For lack of clean, living currents,
Why cannot—in global, protected
Pipes the size of bunkers made
Of (lead-free) new solid kinds
Of concrete and PVC (see, plastic
Can have its use)—why cannot
The world simply drink?
I’d do the same with food to
Stave off starving, if I could, and
Disease, if it could be tunneled
Under without harming anything,
Beneath
But instead of magic utterances
Or nations’ decrees
I have only these
clcouch123 
Recent Comments