You Know He Used To

The twirl and twine of wind

across a weathered boardwalk

combs the cotton out

of her overhung brain

erasing the way he looked

at her lips, still stung by a kiss.

Storm soaked he arrived

to pierce her psyche

with his porcelain eyes

blue like a first set of china

the kind that’s supposed to last.

She perches on the edge

eyes plunged to the water below

too boiled to hold a reflection.

She smoothes her pale green

skirt into sharp pleats slanted

by a sun too bright with hands

so white they appear to brim. 

High above, a cloud twists itself
into a question mark.

-Debbie Calverley

Alone With Everybody - Charles Bukowski

the flesh covers the bone 
and they put a mind 
in there and 
sometimes a soul, 
and the women break 
vases against the walls 
and the men drink too 
much 
and nobody finds the 
one 
but keep 
looking 
crawling in and out 
of beds. 
flesh covers 
the bone and the 
flesh searches 
for more than 
flesh. 

there's no chance 
at all: 
we are all trapped 
by a singular 
fate. 

nobody ever finds 
the one. 

the city dumps fill 
the junkyards fill 
the madhouses fill 
the hospitals fill 
the graveyards fill 

nothing else 
fills.

- Charles Bukowski

Late Fragment - Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

- Raymond Carver

Check this out..... why do I live here???

Gerry Loose

HAVING REACHED THE HOLY REWARD

  

Her body fades with her hair becomes invisible her skin is a salmon.

Singing eye sings her songs together kine alpine kine grazing.

Guarded life is guarded shielded ringed with soldiers.

South from our slit ribs bees swarm north.

Now is elsewhere jealousy did this.

Thieves clean her breasts.

A bower is constructed high in the thorn.

Three fires jealousy love and death maggot us.

Under no place there are no trees there is no place.

Pulse great throbbing blooded heart harts live in her irises.

Gerry Loose

Happy Valentine's Day ; )

But There's No Wind

He said.

It was two days after the operation

a balmy -28 celsius

almost all the birds had fled

excluding the blue-jays and chickadees –

two of his favourites.

Growing up we always had

a bird book handy 

if anything exotic to us appeared

we would find it out.

Cross-billed, red-breasted, the way

they perched or landed

all part of discovery.   Now at ninety

the hospital was just a perch

that he successfully flitted in and out of.

A winter bird that wears the feathers

of endurance, and most of all
never cease to soar.

Debbie Calverley

Thinking of a Friend At Night - Hermann Hesse

• In this evil year, autumn comes early...
• I walk by night in the field, alone, the rain clatters,
• The wind on my hat...And you? And you, my friend?
•  
• You are standing—maybe—and seeing the sickle moon
• Move in a small arc over the forests
• And bivouac fire, red in the black valley.
• You are lying—maybe—in a straw field and sleeping
• And dew falls cold on your forehead and battle jacket.
•  
• It's possible tonight you're on horseback,
• The farthest outpost, peering along, with a gun in your fist,
• Smiling, whispering, to your exhausted horse.
• Maybe—I keep imagining—you are spending the night
• As a guest in a strange castle with a park
• And writing a letter by candlelight, and tapping
• On the piano keys by the window,
• Groping for a sound...
•  
• —And maybe
• You are already silent, already dead, and the day
• Will shine no longer into your beloved
• Serious eyes, and your beloved brown hand hangs wilted,
• And your white forehead split open—Oh, if only,
• If only, just once, that last day, I had shown you, told you
• Something of my love, that was too timid to speak!
•  
• But you know me, you know...and, smiling, you nod
• Tonight in front of your strange castle,
• And you nod to your horse in the drenched forest,
• And you nod to your sleep to your harsh clutter of straw,
• And think about me, and smile.
• And maybe,
• Maybe some day you will come back from the war,
• and take a walk with me some evening,
• And somebody will talk about Longwy, Luttich, Dammerkirch,
• And smile gravely, and everything will be as before,
• And no one will speak a word of his worry,
• Of his worry and tenderness by night in the field,
• Of his love. And with a single joke
• You will frighten away the worry, the war, the uneasy nights,
• The summer lightning of shy human friendship,
• Into the cool past that will never come back. 

HERMANN HESSE

In a translation by James Wright.