Among Their Pictures
——————————————————————————–

In my memory I’m the one who always wanders
Within their pictures: the stretched black
Strips around the gravestone photograph,
The standing twisted flowers,
The burning candles under their icons.
From inside the scene: suddenly, on
The white margins, I see their fingerprints
Which now appear along with their laughing voices;
Their stifled whispers are breaking me.
Oh, how different it should all be
With them, they should be running
With their warm breath panting,
And not inanimate and flaccid
Like they are now, without their lives.

***

LIKE A THIEF

How can I make you love me?
…and how to fill you
with a dream of me!,
unlikely and impossible
and utterly untrue

…then
slowly steer you to the dire
(smoke and steam
profuse upon the fire) inadequacy
as limitless
as stony bare and vile.

No! It could not possibly
be the same for you!
Oh dream and lullaby and light
to which I give my wounded guile

like a thief
who steals you
in the night.

***

PUTTING COLOR IN THE DRYNESS
——————————————————————————–

There is no blood! There is no cross!
The deep ache which our hearts assay
…depression!, lunatic, unreal
…never meets us anyway.
No petals bloom the flower we feel
should we inscribe a lonely song

because the shoddy echoes steal!
because the TV is turned on
whose money jerks our thoughts away,
whose noisy noisy comedy
is smoke and light
and turns the day into a night
and snuffs the honor of regret.

And briefly do we sense the loss
from time to time, like love’s ennui
…or just before we go to bed
in smoke lost from a cigarette
that so provokes a senseless tear
from eyes that itch
and smear…with red.

The Teaman Appears

On any Himalaya
Mr. Chetri claps twice
and a teaman appears

In his paws a rack of glasses
(wiped not washed)
and a Chinese Thermos
green with red flowers
For a rupee he pours cha

Darjeeling steams
with crude sugar
half milk
spiced with smoke
from the mystic wood
it’s steeped over

The test of tenure
is to scald fingers
and not
set the glass down

You learn to honor the taste
of cremated trees
In these mountains
all wood is rare wood

by J. Kevin Wolfe
————————

All poems from ‘The Year of Purple Lawn Furniture’ (c2001 by J. Kevin Wolfe), afree ebook of poems in various reader formats.
http://home.att.net/~jkevinwolfe/i dex.html

Bio: J. Kevin Wolfe’s poems have appeared in over 60 ezines and in a dozen print publications. ‘The Year of Purple Lawn Furniture’ is a collection of new poems.

***

bad hair day for hitler

a jew beat you hitler
in the war
you started

einstein
(you missed this one)
finished it

your mustache was precise
his hair misbehaved
but all the aryan brains
wouldn’t divulge
his secret to you

so adolph
who turned out
to be the putz?

***