An Organization Man

Through Plate Glass

Why me, and why at the end of the day,
these papers, this punishment?
He knows how bad things are right now
at home, and then to say: 
Turn this around by tomorrow, will you? 

Crossing the window, right to left
at a steepening angle, a jet scoops up 
the distance between my situation 
and my desire to be…oh, anywhere 
jets go.  Where that jet’s going.                      

Lift your sleepy head, my love,
superincumbent heavy thing,
off these two columns with sleeves rolled up, 
their fists embedded in your shadowed cheeks, 
their elbows lodged in the shallow pits
the weight that both these ruins make 
in two thick stacks of market reports.  

It’s already dark. No time to mourn
the loss to sweat of another shirt,
my back to this desk, my rump to this chair,
my ambition to where it’s taken and dumped me.
There’s one train left I could possibly make
and not catch hell for being late or have another
home cooked meal, lukewarm at best, begrudged me.

Street Burial

Cold-shouldered when I got to bed,
A dream kissed me good night instead.

A body I’d inherited,
Alive but given up for dead,

Lay stiff on its back on a plank held over
The leeward side of a ship at anchor.

And in one ear and out the other
The moment after he gave the order

That I be pitched into the gutter
I heard in the cadence of a prayer

The last thing my sad Captain said:
Let it feed on what we fed.

Home to Stay

I never know when I’m alone in nature
what I’m supposed to feel exactly.
I never know what I’m supposed to think.

Out here on the patio birds are calling
to birds, clouds adding layers to clouds,
the river relaxed and waiting. I’m burning
without feeling the brunt, and should go in.

A chipmunk just appeared on a run
and froze upright on catching sight of me.
Now it’s off like a shot across the lawn,
gone in a blink into a mound of ivy.

A light breeze crosses my lower body.
It’s clabbering up to rain, as surely
as my sainted mother said. The family
I partly made is blessedly away.

I can’t stand them when they’re shopping.
I miss the world I used to know
of oh so many years ago
when mother would turn on her radio

and I’d know the weather not having to see
a suit or a skirt or a chart. I almost want
the storm that’s coming to tear this place apart.

First published, in an earlier version, in the Dash Literary Journal