Category Archives: 1, poem, poetry,

CRIED AND DIED

CRIED AND DIED

Empire
he called himself

he was
Ragnar Lothbrok
on steroids

Gengis Khan
with an
attitude problem

at age five
he took down
every toy
store in his
home town

at age twenty-six
the inmates of
a maximun security
prison
broke out
in order to escape
from him

he had the whole text
of Titus Andronicus
tattoed across
his body

and when
the war of final
days was declared

he laughed so loud
he cried and died.

SO

SO

moonlight scattering
its silver
across what
was earlier a
turquiose sea

night
has now turned
dark and forboding

sharks out there
maybe more hunting here
than when
the Sun was rising
or at its zenith

you are not thinking shark
but strumming the chords
of a tune on
a battered guitar
you have had since childhood

somehow
    it strikes up a harmony,
musical counterpoint,
with
   the roar of the waves
as they release their energy
crashing
     onto the white beach
as boiling surf

surf and your song
         so sad of
a sudden

our planet
      really fragile and
we
  have made
it so

a rogue rock
     might do it

vast as a cathedral
as it hurtles through space

pre-empting some
           quietly insane member
of our
species
    depressing some button
launch codes
checking out

and yet
the roar of the waves
hits us with such power
that we
    cannot but conclude
it will last
until
   the end of time
forever and ever

even though (as indeed
the sharks
       might tell us)
it is dying by degrees

MATE

MATE

first
the chess
and there you
got me
King jammed
in the corner by
my own rook

your white knight
on a white charger
simple coup de gras
smothered mate

but nothing
like the chess
the sex afterwards

here the conflagration
much more hussars and
dragoons totally
Napoleonic

me and my Josephine
sharing our huge victory
pincer
   movement, double
envelopment
Jena, Austerlitz cannot
hold a candle
to our fantastic
achievement

in the entirety of
military history never
such a
score  achieved