Category: dVerse

Après Moi le Déluge

~ qbit ~ 29 Comments

Buy-One-Get-One-Free
chicken on sale, the tender breasts
repeated so tenderly I suffer
meat shock repeat after me my wife says
but I still forget and return short-handed, clew footed,
clueless, gizzardly beaked and peaked
with life and liberty and the pursuit of feed corn
sandwiched between life in the fast lane and mayonnaise
it crosses the road again and again
like some kind of pullet Sisyphus,
a chicken of the sea you can tune a guitar but you can’t tunafish,
chicken-handed left-winded side-wounded, wound rewound webfooted,
It bears repeating but no repeating bears since isn’t even one bear unbearable?
The cockscomb truth waggles in the telling
like wind in a two x two chambered heart —
my capon tastes like a castrato
singing in St. Peters




For dVerse MTB

Ground Zero

~ qbit ~ 32 Comments

I visited Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan today
to see if poetry had taken root, like fireweed,
among the cracks in the rubble and the dead.
Instead I heard the voice of a friend

Who reminded me that
the study of death
and dying teaches
nothing.

And so I stood, empty handed,
again, without the grace
to give
or receive.



For dVerse Poetics

Quadrille 68

~ qbit ~ 22 Comments

Wringing out all
forty-four winks of sleep –
the twisted rag of night
leaves wrinkled sheets
damp with sweat.

Carrier pigeons of dreams
in full retreat
back across the Channel,
messages in invisible ink –
I misread “blessings”
which means “wounded”
in Napoleon’s French.



For dVerse Quadrille

Randall On

~ qbit ~ 19 Comments

First we randalled the cattle into the barn,
sort of like wrangling, but longer, leaner,
maybe more handsome too, milking it all
with my stainless steel machine,
uddering, wringing.
Later a calf coming but too large,
so reaching in and chaining its fetlocks,
slippery steel in hand heaving, braced
against the post birthing a bull
they name Randall. The bellowing
of steel, milk and pull.



For dVerse Poetics