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 Neil McKay on February 23, 2016
When the furnace goes out and your bedroom is cold,
It's time to write something terse.
When the washing machine has stopped washing your clothes
A poem won't make the day worse.
When the dishes are dirty and the garbage is stink
When you notice a dripping from under the sink,
When there's too much to do and too little to drink
You might as well write some free verse.
If there's work to be done in your garden of weeds,
A sestina will help you forget
If your children are hungry, they're hungry indeed
You have time for a witty couplet
When you've gone back to college for the seventeenth time,
And you're sure that an IT degree will be fine,
But you want nothing more than to make up a rhyme
A poem's what you probably need.
(Extra line that I don't want to lose: There are sonnets crawling out your finger holes)
Submitted by Neil McKay on February 14, 2016
Dig deep enough, you'll find bones,
This is a graveyard,
This is where I grew up.
There is a cat buried under the gooseberry bush,
A turtle next to the daffodils,
Gerbils and goldfish intertwined in roots of laurel.
There is a soccer player buried by the fence,
A drummer under the crawlspace,
College degrees in the fire pit.
The bodies of past lives decompose slowly,
The dirt becomes rich over time,
Ready to feed new growth.
Already weeds are reaching out for the sun,
The bones, dissolved to ash,
Spend their days giving up.
Submitted by Neil McKay on February 3, 2016
Somewhere an old man is sitting at a table,
Nodding an affirmation to his dinner companion,
Hoping that is the right response.
Somewhere an old man
Stands at the urinal
Waiting.
Somewhere on a park bench
An old man sits
Until the end of another day
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
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