Poof Taste (Alice Bea Guerin), Sonnet #546

 

Shape vanishes into shape, poof!

Imagination needs no proof.

Our skies reveal twisted Saturns

In proliferating patterns.

Approaching stars are spiny jacks —

Their ball, made of Jupiter, cracks.

We squeeze the world from a tube,

But we have to invent the cube.

A piece of unchewed bubble gum

Is galaxy Triangulum.

We read a creature’s intestines

Attempting to absolve our sins,

Interpret shapes of the erased

We find deep inside striped toothpaste.

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here: My Human Disguise.

Song in the Twilight (Franz Sedlacek), Sonnet #464

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here: My Human Disguise.

The bass pedals on the old organ don’t play,

Pumping out an old orangutan’s wheezing,

But the high notes sizzle like windpipes freezing

As the clock reminds us of time’s constant delay.

Rolling his shoulders with the beat, our musician

Has the musicality of a mannikin,

And the dolor of a flowering rubber plant.

His pet bat keeps the studio free of ant

And rat, its wingbeats synchronized with the clock.

There are no works of art on the tear-stained walls

And no pattern on the rug but a reddish flock.

Now our musician sings with a raptor’s calls

For blood or flesh or warning of the death of sound.

The bat chimes in on a gleeful two-part round. 

"Old Busty" (Mihail Chemiakin), Sonnet # 309

They called him "Old Busty" for his bowling ball head
Which he threw at the castle rats and knocked them dead.
The Blue Prince liked to poke his thumbs in his sockets
And press just hard enough OB could see rockets.
The Green Duke begged his father to see a woman.
He petted Dad's purple robe obsequiously
And offered to conjure up a hopeful omen
Of the end of his cranial obesity.
The Prince, ever preoccupied with his big brain,
Could not hear his baby boy's incessant refrain.
"Old Busty," in truth, was named for other reasons,
Long forgotten. He was a she with bumptious breasts,
And once was honored, above all, the sexy best;
No more -- her empty teats fed Blue and Green, her sons.

Morning News (Francis Luis Mora), Sonnet #303

The Times is meant to be crumpled in tight places,
Smudged, barely dry print, the yesterdays of faces.
What's done is done when read and forgotten,
And not until. A caveman looms, leers, teeth rotten,
One eye white, as if turned around in its socket,
The other reading about the latest rocket
Planned to reach the nearest star in a century.
He doesn't stir the slightest curiosity
In young women who can't smell him through their perfume.
The scent of ink is stronger. The stink of the tomb
Draws the caveman back into the metro pages,
Which he'll contemplate as his winey blood ages.
The bus slowly empties of papers and people.
A fallen Times lays gutters up like a steeple.

Note: Among other things, "gutter" is the word for the white
space in a newspaper between the print on the left side
and the print on the right side of the crease.

The Banquet (Magritte), Sonnet #269

The sunset is a fickle idee fixe.
A prayer who cannot focus his mind
On one sentence from last Sunday's sermon,
A scientist who forces what he seeks,
A drunken hunter nodding in his blind,
All, intent on ideas — wavering sun.
But the sun never abandons a thought.
We might see it struggle and dim, caught
In leafed trees, or muddled by fog or haze,
Or gone below horizons where it dies
In the night ashes of extinguished days,
Until it's resurrected as sunrise.
We're all like suns to the sun, its to see
And to burn like an idea — to be.