Showers & Rain
I’d like to see you in showers,
shadows,
memories, final hours
that end this
rain.
Daisies reveal
your simple secrets,
yellow
perverted pleasures, complicated,
often unseen
mysteries like
COVID-19 virus.
Forget your
sins & dance with me.
All petals at
some point fall
in season come
to despair
same as a
desperate ending.
I focus on
memories now
represent all
short stories shared,
a poem or two
no one will remember,
a Hemingway
legacy funeral,
one family
member,
one suicide at a time.
Death
Certificates
We all wait for our death certificates—
aging bodies,
sagging arms, necks with wrinkles.
We drag our
bodies around shopping malls
in all shapes,
funny forms, walk
around in
tennis shoes early mornings.
Don’t stretch
out here too far.
Just get our
groceries, see our grandchildren,
Lucky Charms,
no witchcraft, but Jesus
finds our way
home.
Kansas,
Old Abandoned House
Ekphrastic poem
House, weathered, bashed in grays,
spiders,
homespun
surrounding yellows and pinks
on a Kansas,
prairie appears lonely tonight.
The human
theater lives once lived here
inside are gone
now,
buried in the
back, dark trail
behind that old
outhouse.
Old wood
chipper in the shed, rustic, worn, no gas, no thunder, no sound.
Remember the
old coal bin, now open to the wind,
but no one left
to shovel the coal.
Pumpkin
patches, corn mazes, hayrides all gone.
Deserted
ghostly children still swing abandoned in the prairie wind.
All unheated
rooms no longer have children
to fret about,
cheerleaders have long gone,
the banal house
chills once again, it is winter,
three lone
skinny crows perched out of sight
on barren
branched trees silhouetted in early morning
hints of pink,
those blues, wait with hunger strikes as winter
that snow
starts to settle in against moonlight skies.
Kansas becomes
a quiet place when those first snowfalls.
There is the
dancing of the crows−
that lonely
wind, that creaking of the doors, no oil in the joints.
Jasper
Old Irving Park,
Chicago
neighbourhood
Jasper lives in
a garret
no bigger than
a single bed.
Jasper, 69,
clouds of smoke
Lucky Strike
unfiltered cigarettes.
He dips Oreo
cookies in skim milk.
Six months
ago
the state
revoked
his driver’s
license-
between the
onset
of macular
degeneration,
gas at $4.65 a
gallon,
and late-stage
emphysema,
life for Jasper
has stalled out
in the middle
lane
like his middle
month
social security
check, it is gone.
There is
nothing academic about Jasper’s life.
Today the
mailbox journey is down
the spiralling
stairwell; midway,
he leans
against the wall.
Deep breathes
from his oxygen tank.
Life is
annoying with plastic tubes up his nose.
Relief, back in
the attic, with just his oxygen tank,
his Chicago
Cubs, losers, are playing
on his radio,
WGN, 720 AM.
Equipment,
enjoyment at last,
Jasper leans
back in his La-Z-Boy recliner.
He reaches for
a new pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
Jasper grabs a
lukewarm Budweiser beer from his mini-fridge.
Deep breathes,
a match lite, near his oxygen tank.
Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era and is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. Today he is a poet, freelance writer, amateur photographer, and small business owner in Itasca, DuPage County, Illinois. Mr. Johnson published in more than 2,013 new publications, and his poems have appeared in 40 countries, he edits, publishes ten poetry sites. Michael Lee Johnson has been nominated for 2 Pushcart Prize awards poetry 2015/1 Best of the Net 2016/2 Best of the Net 2017, 2 Best of the Net 2018. Two hundred twenty-four poetry videos are now on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/poetrymanusa/videos. Editor-in-chief poetry anthology, Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1530456762; editor-in-chief poetry anthology, Dandelion in a Vase of Roses available here https://www.amazon.com/dp/1545352089.
Editor-in-chief Warriors with Wings: The Best in Contemporary Poetry, http://www.amazon.com/dp/1722130717.
https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Lee-Johnson/e/B0055HTMBQ%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
I really like 'Kansas' and 'Jasper'.
ReplyDeleteExcellent poetry!
ReplyDelete