Showing posts with label shelter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shelter. Show all posts

Saturday, December 1, 2018

thingamajigs


Call it crude
if you insist
to designate
that whose design
and functionality
seems rudimentary,
basic shelter
remains enough
for those requiring
little more than
distance from destruction.
Wallowing as we do,
from time to time,
the space becomes so small
between,
our feet become our shoes
and it was as if this was
plentiful,
the question of survival
posed as neither
safe nor sound.
Not saying
there were other ways,
and more than enough
to fill blanks
with trinkets.


Painting by: Anonimous french master previously attributed to Trophime Bigot. See official website. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Currency calculator


I worry when we need milk 
and wonder where the daily bread will come from.

Too many survive famine. 

Child support is over a week late. 
The Department holds the money it collects from others,
on behalf of others, extra days, 
in an interest-bearing account.
The Department makes more money
that way, it adds up in
arrears and years that cannot be spent
growing and splitting heirs.

The college decisions are coming in. 
We all wonder where this will take us. 
We need to pick a meal plan. She will not starve,
she hopes-
they better have good coffee. 

While driving to take the truck in for an unknown repair, 
the sky held up its coolest winter blue,
the air was crisp like minted dollars,
and I could not take my eyes off the sky
while riding home.

It said everything.

And utterly cloudless,
when I spy a shuttlecock of white, like a flash, in contrast to the blues,
I watched this meteoric figure against the broad daylight
falling, fading, falling, 
and finally, disappearing into the sky,
it all sunk in.

Like small talk, no granular attention is paid.
Burned up. I am broke anyway. 
Just like today. This week, I am weaker
than gravity.

Lighter with empty pockets and incinerating
into nothing,
but solid air pumping in and out of the chest
like fire and ice,
all the elements are there and it is enough 
for a poem. 


Photo credit By Clivelindsay at English Wikipedia, 'Comet McNaught with moon setting over the sea' [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

And then...

  Change is like that strong smell of cut grass or chopped wood that stops you still. Patterns, a symbol can be an illegible sign,  at first...