StarPoet Newsletter Vol. X, No. VI

A dragonfly caught
On a finger standing,
A memory from my childhood
And my father
Instructing me not to move:

Ten seconds, a half minute,
And then the dragonfly escapes
-- The moment as no linkage
To before or shortly after
With my father in our backyard.

My footprints swept away,
I retrace my past,
Searching my neurological historian
For suggestions of memory,
Fragments of place and feeling
That I can weave, piece by piece,
Into a single coherent jigsaw
Afloat the slipstream that is my life..

The Coke can is empty,
The popcorn's gone and the cable movie
Plays in the background to the end;
The sun has a handful of minutes left,
The temperature falling an hour ago
As the north wind rose across the lakes.

A mid-winter night without snow or ice,
But chill enough to sweater us
As we watch classic films in HD;
Later we will curl together for warmth
And discuss weighty realities in our bed
As we wait for sleep to take us.

What more can life be than this,
Than waking in the arms of your lover?

There are times that the circus train
Will follow the tracks as they lay,
Even if you associate with the fire eaters,
The acrobats won't do as you say,
The lion tamers will be openly hostile,
And the clowns will make fun of you
The first time you look away.

Try as you want to change the direction,
The steel rail has been laid for decades,
You're not the engineer or even the conducter,
At best you are the ringmaster who introduces
The scheduled acts and attempts to make sense
In the center ring while the masquerade ball
Swirls all around under the Big Top.

Sometimes the great circus comes hesitantly to rest
Beside a brightly colored station house at some new location;
The elephants still parade down main street, the marching band
Still plays Sousa and Cecil B. DeMille like they own them
While you sit back in the dimly lit office making ends meet
And the cheers from the surging crowd turn to loud angry chants
When the magician's big come-on has no finish.

If I am anywhere, I am here,
Hurtling towards Hercules and Andromeda
As I spin around Polaris,
Writing poetry, contemplating the heavens
And Earth's place -- and ours -- in the universe.

If I am anywhere, I am here,
Buried in these artfully chosen lines
That separate the poet from her audience
-- I am aware that you are reading this
And there are certain standards on which I insist.

But if I am anywhere, I am here
Between the words and implied metaphors,
Lurking in the darkness, recording your reactions,
Checking for the telltale pulse of academic approval
That will kill this moment of spacetime for ever.

I bite my lip,
Suppressing a smile,
Thinking of you,
Another world, another time.

If all had been different,
If we both had been younger,
Could we have avoided
All those years of mistakes?

Who knows where fate would have led,
If we'd not been caught in our won stories,
All those years would still lie before us,
We could have had everything and each other.

Lightly falling powder
Sweeps across the sidewalk,
A dusting of Winter
Swirling in the breeze.

Feer not, Washington,
Even if you treat it like a blizzard,
The rain tomorrow will wash it all away
And your world return to a comfortable gray.

A thirty-ish Air Force captain
(Of the definitely female rank)
Has been checking me out in the corridors
Several times in the last few weeks.

The first time, our eyes met,
I smiled as did she,
The second and third,
We noticed each other looking.

This afternoon, however,
I avoided direct contact
But noticed she was looking
When I passed -- my lips betrayed

my involuntary happiness --
And I saw the beginning of her smile
As I continued down the hallway
To my oh so very important teleconference.

I was cute at twelve,
I shall be cute at ninety-two,
Even if the texture of the dimples suggest
A certain closeness to the grave
That I am unwilling to admit.

Recession appears to be picking up steam,
Super Bowl advertisers seek commerical balance,
In salmonella scare look closely at your nuts,
Obama's half brother held on drug charges.

Limbaugh the voice of conservative conscience,
Is this the last year for American Idol,
Baby born with twelve fingers and toes,
Springsteen apologizes for his Wal-Mart deal.