NO MORE WINTER BLUES

Why do they call it
          “Winter Blues?”

From my window I see no blue

The sky is the sullen gray
of decrepit drywall

The lawn wears the brown cast
of oxidized flesh

Trees, their limbs twisted and exposed,
look like emaciated monsters,
their hides blackened and scarred

From this moment forward
let the season be called
          “Winter pale”

For like an embalmed corpse
          its color has been drained
          and it awaits burial

###






                                                   BELOW THE LINE

I wish
          I had been born and raised in the deep south

Far below the Mason Dixon Line
          instead of being planted in the upper Midwest
          like a primordial glacier
          all rock solid
          and lethargic,
          lake winds coiled around my spine
          January whiteouts blinding
          like cataracts

And as I push
          a snowblower through a drift,
          somebody somewhere
          is slick with sunblock,
          and dripping with Gulf waters,
          grateful they weren’t born
          north of the Mason Dixon Line

SOUTH HAVEN

SOUTH HAVEN

Autumn
          October
hunched along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan
like an abandoned child
South Haven waits for summer’s return

My wife and I
stroll the streets
now reticent and barren
like the beach itself
sulking behind the buildings
where seagulls screech their impudent calls
as they prepare their escape
from the looming
hostile Michigan winter

Along the beach
rows of gift shops
tee shirt shops
fast food cafes
sit shuttered and dark
rejects to the changing season
that leaves them barren and sequestered
like victims of a dreaded disease

The sound of our footsteps
ring past the seaside inns,
their blinds drawn against blank windows
the season’s dust settling like a plague
over unused furniture
closeted like unwanted dogs
behind locked doors

The clouds
like charcoal smudges
across a translucent canvas
wallow in their own reverie
hang
then drift eastward
over jade waters churned
by the rebuke of fall’s stiletto winds

South Haven
lives for the drone of motorboats
skiers in tow,
and the background chorus of tourists
in their flip flops and shorts,
hot hands clutching cold drinks
watching their kids scurry to the lake
like berserk lemmings

But as the inevitable cycle
plays itself out,
one last gull paces the beach
looks westward
and anticipates an arduous flight to the sun
as autumn bites
at its wings

MOHAMMED’S MESSENGER

Beneath the cloak,
his upper body is girdled
by a vest ladened with explosives

He meanders through the streets,
each step bringing him closer to martyrdom
 each heartbeat a plea for immortality

His eyes are blurry from the cataracts
of religious zeal that blinds him
from the bleating of children and stoic old women

who are, to him, mere dust particles
in a windstorm of heresy for which
he will mete out their punishment

His thoughts are locked on his reward
of a paradise filled with virgins
awaiting his arrival so that he may

devour the fruits of their chaste innocence.
His faith is as steady as the sun over Mecca
that lights his path to the bosom of Allah,

for he knows there is only one truth:
in the nanno second following his vaporization
he will either be greeted by 72 voluptuous virgins

or devolve into a baleful eternity of blackness.
Either way
he’s fucked