Epitaph for a Dead Bouquet * Refrigerate After Opening * Naming Names * Heartless 3 * Staring at the Sun

 

Epitaph for a Dead Bouquet

Here’s something I was interested to learn
talking to another man in line:

it’s possible to break your jaw
merely by laughing.

He smiled without showing his teeth,
and I felt a familiar emptiness,

as when voices float down at dusk
from the barred windows of Juvenile Hall,

or the shadow of the photographer
falls crookedly across the child in a photo,

or minutes turn into days,
and days into nine leafless oaks.

Refrigerate After Opening

When I wake at last from a hundred-year nap,
my wife is still on the phone

attempting to reason
with the Disputes Department,

and our daughter,

the beautiful, black-haired barista
who lives in a distant city,

is finishing up a double shift.
Her back was turned to me

throughout my dream,
her sun-brown shoulders shaking

as if she were crying.
Was it the small table of ghosts

that so upset her,
or had she seen reflected in the metal surfaces

water birds stupidly stumbling about on land?
There’s nothing more honest than failure.

The spruce tree may become a cello,
but the heart – the heart chokes on its own blood.



Naming Names

A double-yellow line
means one thing
when you’re driving
on this side of the border,

but another
when you’re the passenger,
your hands lying
uselessly in your lap

and the bored children
in the back seat foolishly
insisting on asking,
as the road turns north

and then disappears
among the barbwire trees,
why you named them
for people who were dead.



Heartless 3

Her heart moves in
with my heart.

At dinner she stares down
without appetite at the roses

clotting on the plate.
I ask how her day was.

She shrugs – her heart
doesn’t consider

languishment and pain
to be subjects

for dinner conversation.
But sometimes it wonders

just what took place
before it got here

that night trembles
under the table,

waiting for scraps.



Staring at the Sun

There’s something else
I should be doing

but the sun allows
what state law prohibits

a heart with manual transmission

and I’ve always been partial
to polite dissent

my eighth-grade math teacher
when she confiscated the laser light

said You could blind someone
Exactly I said

_________________________________

Howie Good has a name made for a writer, and he has lived up to destiny admirably, producing nine poetry chapbooks, a full length book of poetry entitled Lovesick, twelve scholarly books, and miscellaneous other works. Somehow he also has the time to teach journalism at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He chronicles his writing life at www.apocalypsemambo.blogspot.com/. His poems are made up of small moments and dissent; they will leave you looking into your life and grabbing for the moments on the periphery.