ON PREPARING TO PLAY BACH AGAIN

Approach his brimming universe, first, delicately –
careful not to shock or skew the balances that float
and intertwine throughout into exactitudes –
like strands of sentient silk – intent on forming lace-like
symmetries, trajectories persisting to solution – second:

brace yourself for landing brutally on rock: expect
as you blast down to crash as hard as his unyielding
adamantine moon can smash you – swoon:
bleed from the punch, and taste the blood – careen –
again, again, until the battering suggests the hunch:

that this – whatever this insistence is – requires
attention of unparalleled completeness – breathe –
and let the pain flow into sweetness – simmer through
the anguish to the silences: experience the sensuosity
and balm – impute the change to this allowance:

his permission to be conscious – see and use the gift
of it until it fully blooms to polyphonic song – and you’ve
no mortal doubt that you belong – in his affliction
and his calm. Heed his metronomic heart, of which
you’ll be a breathing, feeling, beating part.

Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett)

JOHNNY TWO BOWS

He’s fishing trout in icy waters
he’s watching snowflakes fall through the ceiling
has the Milky Way for a pillow
but on his back, he’s sweating peanuts
in a ward for seasoned veterans
for the loud and silent screaming
the terminally burnt to a crisp

Tomorrow morning,
he’s headed back to Las Cruces
where he’ll run the marathon
he should have won in senior year
into the arms of his Dolores
pledged to marry when he returns from war
which he shall, but more like toast

He’s headed home on Amtrak
chugging southward to Colorado
to the love of a high plains desert
to sights he’s known since he was young,
but now the bitch returns with vengeance
it’s not Dolores who he is cursing
but the smashed knee up to his groin

the searing pain of wounded knee
the very leg in action missing
which he swore they sewed back on
but truer is a stump than all a world of wishing
Thus, Johnny Two Bows, insanely tortured,
hallucinates to distract himself,
and visits Frost in A Wishing Well

“A poet would a wishing go...”
but then falls back to shitty combat
the smell of napalm
in the linings of his nose,
and a philosophical expletive explodes
like shrapnel for every sorry Dick to hear and feel
“What the fuck is poetry?”

With that sounds a gong epiphany,
like that of feathered ancestors,
hooping ‘round him with beating drums,
like a rainbow trout netted on last gulps,
like one more marathon before departing,
the voice he hears could be of Frost himself—
it’s not so much of what you’re saying, Sonny

as to how you turn a chosen phrase,
and that is poetry now and forever
as snowflakes darken one by one
and lids sink deeper than any night,
and winds whip out of nowhere
across the high desert country
of Johnny Two Bows, RIP

Abigail Weatherspoon (mapovia)

A LONG WAIT

It is a long wait
At the metropolitan
Crowded bus stand,
You wait, but the long line
Of eroded thoughts
Still crops up to regain
to pest you internally,
your umbrella tilts,
the flared up dust and wind
move past to settle on the
poster on the wall,
you shudder at
the sight of the
tilting bus almost
touching the ground,
the commuters are like
push and pull buttons.
it is a long wait
for so many
for the ration card,
more for the ration rice
to be pilfered and sold
for the double rate,
to treble their income,
it is a long wait
for the honest and choked,
amidst bohemian, blatant,
seems to be eternal wait
so many in the queue,
it is a long wait,
it is a long, long wait.

S. Radhamani