New Historians
New Historians
pore through the past
writing check lists
for the present
and a wish list
for the future.
This is not history.
This is the only history
worth extending.
New Historians
pore through the past
writing check lists
for the present
and a wish list
for the future.
This is not history.
This is the only history
worth extending.
When you ask me
where the boy went
I listen
with the ears he left me.
He’s not here
in the sounds we each inherit
or the dinner down the hall
that sniffs around our room.
I have to catch him
past you
through the paler square of paint
through the nail hole
that bore
a former tenant’s portrait.
He’s alone there
still
beneath the slant-roofed ceiling
peeling slivers of old […]
Cross Talk
Left hanging
will be a saying
in the destined nation
a millennia or two since my aching feet
and palms are ripped from this rare piece of reused tree.
I thirst
for better revelations
than bumper stickers promising
to free machines from their manifest sins. Sorry
friends. No rapture will come to your four-horsemen town.
I am that I am
a haggard rabbi with no […]
This obscenity of cheese.
Shot deer out for a cartop ride.
Tongues stuck out from the truckbeds.
The peculiar habits of the Northern
Red-necked, Beer-gutted Xenophobe
Trolling the green for swarthy shades.
And abject depression of a whole state
On Monday morning when the gods
Lose Sunday to foreign mortals.
January 2008, © joesmith