Shadow Self
It’s always there
no matter how much
you deny it, no matter how many times
you beat it into submission
or lose to it or let it down.
It’s always there, like the face caught
by a mirror, like an invisible,
bruise under the skin,
like the present moment
and all the heart’s vices.
It’s always there watching you
waiting for you to squirm
with regret, to burn with humiliation,
to bathe yourself in delusions
or buy a rope and stand
on a broken-legged chair.
It never goes away and never gives up.
It’s always just simply
waiting for the olive
branch you will never
give it.
The Sisyphos of Bruno-Bürgel-Weg
every morning they would pass
under my window: a tall old man pushing
his quarter ton companion in a double-wide
wheelchair
the wheelbase of the chair
was too wide for it to fit on the sidewalk
they would travel on the street the cars swerving
around them honking people ogling no one
offering help it was understood
that this was the old man’s boulder back humped
eyes bulging old legs driving stopping
every fifty feet or so to catch his breath or mop
his troubled face
I didn’t know the relationship
of the two I only knew that they came from the care
home down the street and would return
at sunset passing under my window they were
the timepiece of the street the personality
and little ornament dangling from it
but then one day
they didn’t go by and that day turned into several
months and I wondered if they’d been moved
to another care home or if the fat one died
or if the old man had said to hell with his boulder
but no one I asked seemed to know the answer
and now the only memento left to remind me
of them is a green dumpster parked at the construction
site next to the care home
the dumpster is the property
of a company called SISYPHOS and in big
white letters it has that word painted
on the side of it.
The Hermannplatz Street Musician
A humpbacked Roma
in a silk headscarf
and a patchwork of violets
purples and bright merlots.
Her eye floats toward me
with a tender smile.
At the noses of her boots
an open violin
case asks to be fed.
My hand rummages
through my pocket,
comes up empty.
I shrug.
She gives me a forgiving smile,
her eye floating
in another direction,
her impassioned bow flowing
over the silent crowd.
The crowds here are unusually
silent. They shuffle past,
the music
falling off their ears and shoulders and hips,
dusk carrying them off.
They are gone, replaced by
new crowds,
different odds, new silences,
a different song,
and those soft,
forgiving eyes –
how much they have seen,
how much they are needed
on these trash-blowing, graffiti-painted,
cruel-hearted streets.
the american dissident
professor such and so
of swamp press
barnstable mass.,
whose poems have all the grace
and dance
of a busted radial arm
saw fancies himself the second-coming
of thoreau or some poet
or something else
that rhymes with something
in that hoity-toity
french he flexes professor
such and so
spends his nights alone
underground contriving
manifesto
papers to use against moon & sun not to mention
editors paint brushes
fire-escapes
resistance-pants inflatable
mattresses; god save (ahem) the (ahem)
venerable honourable
g. tod (ahem)
slone
(ahem.)
Runa the Wise
Runa’s been through hell’s high water
in her short life.
Before she was sent across three
countries in a cube
van to come live with us,
she’d had two pregnancies, a bout of homelessness,
a starvation period, an eye operation,
probably never saw a body
of water, and never slept
anywhere but on the cold Romanian ground.
Runa is a shar pei, golden
of fleece, face furrowed with all manner
of thick, contemplative wrinkles.
Sometimes when I look at her I see
a guard dog for some ancient Chinese
monarchy. Sometimes I see a philosopher,
a lion, a fox, a clairvoyant, the poet
Li Po. Runa contains multitudes,
much more than many people
I know. And even when she chews
a stick or sticks up her fluffy tail and wiggles
her doggy butt in a bush,
she proves it.
By M.P. Powers
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