Clayton Medeiros's Shared Poems

Actors in the streets
Shakespeare's words alive and well
Theater everywhere

Excessive sanctimonious righteousness
Frays the world’s despairing patience
In this season of political shenanigans
Where every misleading speech
Abounds in effortless rationalizations
With greed perceived as a social good
Ill gotten treasure turns on itself
A need forever unfulfilled
In endless irreducible paranoia
Like Anthony’s ironic furor
Against gifts rendered to Caesar
Where murder turns on itself
Through a door that never closes

The past carries into the present
Unfinished business of love and loss
Familial quarrels twist and turn
Foolish feints and sleights of heart
Forever elusive forgiveness
Among unconditional expectations
Regretful words said
When tart tongues
Dissuade good intentions
Perhaps moving a pawn on a
Game board with no squares
Just random kings and queens
In search of monarchies
Clearly marked on the map
Carefully hidden beneath the
Fatuous field of play

Pianos rarely make love
Saxophones do
Maybe trumpets
Perhaps flugel horns
Never clarinets

Wallets and Men

The only wallet in the room
He stood against the closed wall
A watcher among them at the crowd’s end
Defined in hand shakes and pirouettes
A few idle deal makers and toe dancers
Await some strong arms to float them
Or perhaps a soft beachy breeze
In almost sunset late afternoon
Where light smooths each edge
As if colors had rhetorical timbre
At the moment of intense crisis
The end of the world at least for some
Or the birth of something new and effervescent
Yet rooted in Chthonic memories
Where hypothalamus meets the earth
In mutual ecstatic discoveries
That leave niceties behind
Establish common ground with coyotes
Who carefully watch the almost sunrise
Time to rest time to rest at last