Submitted by joshua mertz on March 20, 2016
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great Fall
A marvelous Summer, a beautiful Spring
But Winter for him was a terrible thing
Submitted by joshua mertz on March 20, 2016
The Guide Dog survives
Being younger and
Smaller than depicted
The Guide Dog lived a lesser life
Eating the uncaring love
Of the blind one
The cleansing of the glass eye
Glimpsed once in a mirror
By a quiet dog
The Always Walk on the
Arm of sworn to protect
Sometimes at night
The Guide Dog turned off
All the lights
And walked the house
By memory and feel
Hoping to run into
The meaning of life
Waiting unconsciously
For the next twitch of the tether
As natural as rain
Cold rain
Until the end
The clouds part
The blind one leaves
Never saying a word
As natural as rain
Cold rain
The Guide Dog survives
Submitted by joshua mertz on February 24, 2016
Her ghost is here tonight
Sitting beside me on the couch
And I wonder, in my melancholy
If it could have worked
Her eyes are loving, sad, and deep
Her smile a light that hurts the heart
But ghostly, unseen
The breath of presence
She was queen of the desert
Oasis of my heart
Abandoned
As I have left all the things
That have not left me
The ghost remains
In the farthest corner of my skull
And sings a song of wonderment
And joy and forgiveness
From beyond that great silent wall
Submitted by joshua mertz on January 27, 2016
My mother used to kill rubber bands
Thinking they were bugs
Curly, insidious things at the edge
Of her sight
Waiting in peripheral perception
With extended antennae and filthy bug feet
Until my mother
Ninja of the kitchen
Would swat the peripheral bug
With the newspaper she was reading
Then lift the deadly newsprint
To find she had killed yet another
Rubber band
Eventually she started hanging the rubber bands
On door knobs
And hiding them in drawers
To keep herself from the tyranny
Of imagined bugs
At the edge of the world
It was only later that I came
To understand the metaphorical significance
Of this flawed human versus rumpled rubber
Slap down
What we see at the edge
Is not what is there
But a warped echo
Of how the world sings to us
The rubber band
Pulled from its frantic newsprint embrace
To rest in tangled ambush
Next to a reading woman
Could have been a piece of candy
Or a piece of cookie
Or a tiny kitten
Or a sliver of dream
Instead it was a bug
An invader and despoiler
Bent on domination and defecation
Of my mother’s house and life
And kitchen
I’ve been trying to look at
My periphery of late
Hoping to see rubber bands
And cookies
There is something there
But it is hard to see
Because it is, after all
At the edge of perception
I think it might be
A bug
Submitted by joshua mertz on December 26, 2015
The bitter cold
And the things lost
The time dribbled through fingers that
Dream of tomorrow
Instead of clasping now
To the bone and the muscle
And the left eye
The one that sees poetry
Out in the bitter cold
To get the morning paper
The sun crouching below the horizon
Blue grey black in the air
The flashlight path
Turns magical
With a scattering of tiny lights
Diamonds of ice
Starlight fallen to earth
Wonder and redemption
In the bitter cold
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