IF, Sonnet #608

If the end doesn’t end, what then?

This moment is already contingent.

I dare you to count from one to ten,

To ignore a found dime, even a cent.

Each moment just comes back to us

Like the wind in the tree’s susurrous.

We’ve never been here before to be.

Yesterday and tomorrow are empty.

If I walk around the block every day —

If the houses never look the same —

If flowers grow and trees disappear —

The sidewalk means don’t lose your way.

“If” says don’t misremember your name,

Though nothing guarantees that I am here.

Haiku, 7/30/26

Midnight in July —

A cricket echoes my mind —

One sound from many —

The Master Builder

Lizards stick out forked tongues at each other
In their race to the top of gilded stairs,
Where they'll disappear because nothing's there.
Dogs climb ladders to trumpeters. Mother
Seeks to fill her empty basket with air.
Fireworks state the geometry of the day.
The man near the dry fountain sleeps his life away;
Because he can't understand a thing, he can't care.
Each window, pillar, arch, and capital,
Each wall, riser and tread, each finial,
Was hauled into place by now frozen block
And tackle, which the builders left behind
(Should they someday return). Here there's no clock,
Few shadows, no lights, only double bind
Architecture, mind alleys of the blind.

Warmonger

No bullet can penetrate my new skin,
Sleek and orange and exquisitely thin.
I'm so perfect now, a parade of me
Runs past the black flags of the armory.
I'm joined by a smart, lock-loaded army.
As we march, everyone behind his hood,
Goose-stepping, a phalanx — might over good —
We stare down the innocent and swarthy.

Scylla and Charybdis Have Fun with Odysseus

The most treacherous, the spawn-of-mythos

Murderer — mirage of a whirl pool

Beneath hanging cliffs -- who can’t even hunt,

Must make his fate, deep, and anonymous,

The passing by of the delicious fools —

Some polling pols in their pathetic punt.

Homebound, risking the Straits of Hormuz a

Sailor thought long on vicious Scylla --

Better hands full of mates torn asunder

Than let his rudderless vessel founder.

He straddled the prow with a golden shield

Upraised to fend off raking teeth and claws.

The monsters ignored him and scythed their yield,

Leaving the leader to his insane cause.

Narcissus Looking in the Pool

I should call that man a nattering ass

Who says he created my looking glass

Since I opened his mouth to amuse me

With my own exquisite philosophy.

No one can say I didn’t make the world

That flaps like a flag some soldier unfurled.

I needn’t apologize that I willed

To have that soldier spared, wounded, or killed.

There’s no one to extend my regrets to,

Except my entirely imagined “you.”

I make, making sure I can’t change today.

“Prove it!” you demand, which I made you say.

There’s only my beautiful Narcissus

And can be only him and me, no “us.”

Note: Narcissus looked into a clear, unblemished pool of water to see himself, which in Ovid's account, was a secluded spring that no other animals had ever approached. When he leaned down to quench his thirst, he mistook his own mirror image for a water sprite or another being, and fell deeply in love with it.

The Mocker Mocked

“Upon three lines of argument
I’ll construct an actor’s mask
Not for what is, but what is meant,
Should an impudent audience ask.
First, ‘Witches’ nipples make the thumb
Feel glad about its thumbing task.’
Second, ‘My swift tongue can out-drum
The quarrel fought between your ears.’
Last, ‘The idea of me will come
To satisfy your deepest fears.’
Now, dear friends, with your kind consent,
I’ll put this on. Hm, it appears
You conclude my grin’s indecent.
I’m booed when I expected cheers!”