Against a Blue Sky

It has been a while
since I let go of words like a stone
shot against a blue sky.

It must have been hurtful,
to darken this sky so long,
and to keep pouring over me, gloom.

The stone returns and the sky is broken,
with its shards falling on my head.

Siesta

head bowed and silent-
in the afternoon's siesta,
breeze flips the book's pages.

Like a dog

The poem hangs like a dog,
its entire length suspends from the edge,
held by a lanyard on its neck.

The readers are like passers-by,
watching the immobile body hang quietly,
until the dog wags itself and wails.

But, the owner is not around,
and the house is sealed; the entry
is only by climbing to the front porch.

No one feels it right to make the climb,
and so they wait until its neck
gets broken and leave.

But, as fortune would have it,
the writer pulls back the poem
from you, out of view.

Intersection

Not wanting to lose his way
in the labyrinth of lines,

an intersection offers a distraction
from semantics and antics,

of word picks complying with rules,
assuming roles coerced on them,

as symbols or signs isolated
from this and that.

But, how does one move away
off the fringes of a Venn diagram?

Chiaroscuro

As a photographer, it caught my eye
this pathway by the road
that brought me into these woods:
the color of the trees, shrubs, and grass
are subdued, with their details
muted in the shadows
as light streams from above
passing through branches and leaves,
down to these violet flowers
whose petals glow like charcoal embers
from last night’s campfire,
whose color mimics the pale afternoon sky.
I stood there while it lasted
with only my senses as equipment.