Elfish, apples and puffin - a few poems

I'm posting a few poems from my poetry book.


Elfish

If you want to know the truth
I'm a little elfish
a little bit unsung and kind of selfish
impish in my ways and never doubting
my talent or my brains or what I'm spouting
with a great respect for art I love the abstract
and an unconventional taste in space I prefer Pollack
you call yourself a poet but I'm a wordsmith
you see Haiku as art but I see limits
you say it is while I embellish
if you want to know the truth
I'm a little elfish.



Apples

Trees, seeds, bruised knees
rough leaning twisted trees
delicious hard apples
hand plucked bent boughs where leans
old wooden ladders and rusty buckets on
this hot sun smelling day
ready to suffocate
amongst the sweetest trees
with thick ripe fruit and stinging bees
we work not talk
beautiful crisp crunching apple
a rose in harden oval
I could pitch you like a baseball
or bite you in my fist
red so deep I'd kiss
I love these moments
when Heaven is questioned
are you also as fine, as sublime as a summer orchard
and do you have crunching, scrunching apples
ripe on full bent boughs



Puffin

Puffin turned into a stuffed up doll
inside out chemo stitched mouth
Puffin was not very old
but her heart was very cold
Puffin looks like a witches wand
on her head came down
with an evil spell
Puffin scares me because of what
so quick, on her life befell
and made that stitched smile.

puffin was the name I gave a very mean woman at my work.
She was horrible to others.

Once she was so rude to me I stoped as I was walking out the door and couldn't believe I was wishing cancer on her. I realized right there that everyone she dealt with probably did.
I had never wished cancer on anyone before. I don't wish bad things on people. I stopped myself.

Shortly after, she disappeared from work and I was so glad that I didn't bother asking why.

Several months later she returned and her bony body was all puffed up. She looked like a cabbage patch doll. Her demeanor was changed too. She smiled at me trying to be nice but it was a grotesque smile because she looked too much like a cabbage patch doll. That's when I started thinking of her as puffin. Not to be mean. (It's how I reconcile things and put them into words.)

Another co-worker informed me puffin, had cancer and had gone though/or was still going through chemo.

Of course I had nothing to do with it, but I wondered if all the ill will others wished on her, or simply her hate filled body contributed.

I know other people who had cancer that were really nice, loving people, so there isn't really any explanation I can come up with.

It must have been just some odd coincidence.

Either way it changed her and scared the hell out of me.

Just remind me to never get you really, really mad at me. :scared:

I wrote something about a similar circumstance recently. While I would never call it one of my better poems, it seems appropriate to this thread.

Synchronicity

Feeling blocked...no ideas. I
sip halfheartedly on a McLatte
while making random jottings in my journal.
It's said when you commit yourself
to a course of action, of creativity,
chance will give you what you need.
I'm pressing far too hard, I write,
I only need to let things happen.

Then I look up, to see
the parking lot awash with lights
as ambulances and fire engines converge
around a distant car. An accident? A
heart attack? I imagine some pedestrian
broken under wheels, a driver gasping for
yet one more breath.

Shoppers pull lazily into the lot, oblivious
to all around them, as paramedics rush
to someone, something, I can't see.

I'm not going out there, not going
to find what pain waits there for me
to cast into cold, artful words.

If this is synchronicity,
I want no part of it.

very playful...