Submitted by joshua mertz on October 28, 2015
A grandiloquent rhetoritician
Discoursed on the slang use of bitchin'
"I may be pedantic
But the word drives me frantic
And sets my red pencil to itchin'"
I read this at Tuesday Night Poetry and an audience member, hearkening back to my infamous ecdysiast (a fancy name for a stripper) limericks, said I should write a limerick about an ecdysiast rhetoritician. So I sat down and did just that
An ecdysiast rhetoritician
Would take off her clothes and go fishin'
The men that she knew
Would come along too
And thought that her outfit was bitchin'
Submitted by Michael Mayhew on October 26, 2015
I took my daughter
To the graveyard
On a day without funerals
She totted up
The spans of the dead
From their epitaphs
Then clambered an oak
Twenty feet above the ground
My heart thumped
A poem called
"More Years Gone
Then Remain"
And the crows
Gabbled and cawed
My daughter and I
Built a graveyard
In the yard
With gauze props
Styrofoam and
Black lights
I clambered up our oak
Twenty feet above the ground
And clutched the bark
Till my muscles
Knotted
My heart banged a
Measure called
"You Are Fragile
As A Mouse"
And my Girl cawed
Back at the crows
This morning I saw
Someone thrashing
In the road
A mouse
Mortally damaged
But struggling still
One by one with
Avarice in their
Oil drop eyes
Crows landed
I drove around
Glad my daughter was
At school
My heart sang a
Dirge called
"You Really Could
Do More"
And the crows
Circled up to
Finish things
Submitted by Neil McKay on October 25, 2015
Your process is inefficient, my love.
The coffee beans are too far removed from the grinder.
A larger scoop would allow you to fill the filter
With less motion and more accuracy.
Heaping scoops have too much variability
Leveling them off would allow for precise measurements.
Morning is the time for peak efficiency
That is why I rise at six even on weekends
As you stretch into the warm blankets I left behind
Reaching for another hour of sleep, and then another
Interrupted by the irregularity of three alarm clocks
At intervals of five, seven and nine minutes.
There is no method to your madness of papers
Carpeting the living room carpet as you sit
On the floor and multitask your weekends
Moving forward but never gaining ground.
My work is organized into bits of data,
Stored redundantly on a server in Texas.
There are better ways to do things, my love
Still my mornings consist of listening for your alarms
Scooping and grinding your coffee with wasted motion.
Estimating the timing to be ready when you rise.
Inelegant procedures that provide continuity
Can hold together a symbiotic system with incredible integrity.
Submitted by joshua mertz on October 20, 2015
When we were green
Meadows and there were
Flowers and the sun
Shone in us because we
Were green and full of flowers
And loving arms rejoiced when
You came home
Then there was sunshine
A bouquet of names
Of all the things we loved about
You and me and the
Other things did not matter
Because we were green
And there were flowers
Submitted by joshua mertz on October 20, 2015
There was a time when the light
Of the late afternoon
On the golden rolling hills
Was music
Now is is just light
On dead plants
Made dim with the
Low angle of the sun
There was a time when the air
Was alive with magic
With smells and sound
And a living caress
And the golden light
Of late afternoon
Now it is just air
The magic evaporated
By the grinding friction
Of what was once
Our love
There was a time when the water
Was your touch
And the spinning dance
Of being in this world
With you
Was the very heart
Of magic
Now it is lawyers and anger
And bitter backward glances
Rising in an epiphany
Of pain
In the dim light
Of the darkening sky
I wish I could wish it back
But the world is no longer new
The air, the light, the water
Now just elementals
Lacking the fourth facet
Of fire
For the fire is long gone
Leaving behind the fifth elemental
Named void
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