StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XXVIII

Six crows, their morning revery
Disturbed by her presence,
Loudly object to the poet,
Swooping and circling about her head,
Watching atop the nearby roof beams;
She slows her walk, taking note,
Searching for the roadkill
They are aggressively protecting:
A squirrel, lately dashing,
Who lost track of space and time
And paid dearly for his lesson.

The sidewalk is scarred with
The charred remnants of snakes,
Empty rocket casings litter the ground,
Children's burnt sparklers lie scattered;
The air smells faintly of sulfur
The morning after the celebration.
Come Tuesday, empty beer bottles
Fill the trash, barbeques lie dormant
As America struggles back to work
Beneath July's breathless heat.

Delays on the blue and yellow lines,
Unexpected track work up north;
Eighty degrees at oh six hundred,
Thunderstorms severe this afternoon;
Just another summer day in Washington,
Home of the many, the uncertain, and the sweaty.

Watching the soldiers lunch,
Private, Colonel, it's all the same,
Eating the food like a warrior,
Strong, purposeful bites
That escew the effete chewings
Of the less fearsome civilians;
Perhaps it's the uniform
Or the wisdom of the pack,
For male or female, most everyone
Still consumes their food
Like they're back in a war zone.

The girls approach the school bus stop
In groups of two or three, closely talking;
The guys straggle in, singly and unconcerned,
Forming a boys club as they wait for the bus.

Neatly dressed in their summer fashions,
The girls watch the boys showing off;
The guys, quite uniform in jeans and tees,
Pretend not to notice any girls are looking.

You can talk about your dead poets
And speculate on your Michelangelos,
Death begins when you stop taking chances,
When you accept the world as it sees you.

The clatter of my birthdays slowly mounts,
Cup by cup, the coffee wakes me;
I would not sleep except my body makes me,
I will not die before death takes me.

Everything has its time, even the birds of the air,
The universe is vast, space mostly infinite,
I hold tight the wormhole, ever breathing,
Refusing to willingly surrender.

It's dangerous to be a sixteen year old girl,
Walking to the store, coming home from school,
Hanging at the mall with your girlfriends:
You never know when a fixated pedophile
Will snatch you for his dinner.

It's a fact of life for the female of the species,
She must learn to make quick judgements of the male,
His looks, his brains, the quality of his intentions;
She gets only a few moments to make her decision,
If she guesses wrong, she never guesses again.

Birdtalk chattering the summer background,
A single dove forlornly searching
The warm asphalt for her morning seed:
At the bus stop, human primates stand,
Moving slowly to not upset the humidity.
The oil rises from the gulf by the hour
While the president goes back on television
To proclaim and demand that Physics change;
Another basketball player cuts and runs,
As Baseball slips into midsummer mode
On this the first full week of July.

In the world of Washington
   And the Department of Defense,
If you arrive on time
   You're already late;
  
The decisions have been made,
   Your money's been spent,
The powers that be
   Have decided yoiur fate.
  
So learn this lesson and learn it well,
   And don't take time to blink,
Be early, be armed, be ready to fight
Or find yourself standing at the gate.

When our sun has grown dull red
And the oceans have blown off to space,
The human species, whatever we've become,
Will look back with little regret;  No more
Than we weep for Olduvai and the Afar
And our ancestors who gave their lives there
So Homo Sapiens could spend her
Few first minutes on Earth's green hills,
So soon a cinder inside a dying star.