Library (Franz Sedlacek), Sonnet #463

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My Human Disguise.









The library is every room in my home.

Books paper the walls; teetering stacks on the floor

Can threaten me if I’m not careful where I walk.

I won’t tell you that I have read every tome.

It’s the yet-to-be-read books a library’s for —

A near-endless resource — reasons why I don’t talk.

Oh, to have them all in one room and organized

By author, genre, or ranked according to size.

The endless hours I've spent looking for one volume

And not finding it — it’s like exploring a tomb.

I know a man with one hall as big as a church

For his collection, bequeathed to him by his Aunt —

Every book by or about Immanuel Kant.

He only uses it for his cockatoo’s perch. 

Nightly Walk (Karl Hauk), Sonnet #462

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My Human Disguise.

I walk only during the day,

But it wasn’t always that way.

I lived on a dirty river

Beneath an iron train trestle.

As if the night and I wrestled

For ideas neither delivered,

I’d walk the bank, throwing stones

And heard nothing but senseless tones.

Years later, I wandered sidewalks

With firefly illumined street lamps,

Flickering houses like armed camps.

The slightest sound made my blood balk.

The stars zoomed — atomic missiles.
With each breath my last lung whistled.

Landscape with Lanterns (Paul Delvaux), Sonnet #461

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My Human Disguise.

The doorways are too small for grown women,

Who’re as tall as the ever-lit street lamps.

This is a city of unspoken sin,

Surrounded by ancient stones and armed camps.

Litter bearers take angels to the lake,

Where wing-naked once again they wake

In the warm waters off the stoney shore

Only to find that they’re angels no more.

On the flagstone street a mother, praying

Or reading from a book, awaits the Change,

The moment when she and all her daughters

No longer hear what men are unsaying,

When all they’ve understood becomes deranged

And their minds (if not their souls) are slaughtered.

Tyrannosaurus Rex, “Sue” (Field Museum), Sonnet #460

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My Human Disguise.

It’s thought s/he was a filthy scavenger, 

Like rats, roaches, or the turkey vulture.

Her arms were just too small and weak to fight,

And all a ruse that prodigious bite!

Absurd, a monster roaming on and on

Looking for whose leftover carrion?

They say volcanoes or an asteroid

Killed them all off in a few years or days,

Leaving earth a dark and near-lifeless void,

Blind for millennia to solar rays.

I loved them as a kid. Now I wonder

Why we don’t tremble today at thunder

Of beasts. New catastrophes loom, some think.

Will we live long enough to be extinct?

Philosophy, 1899 (Gustav Klimt), Sonnet #459

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My Human Disguise.

That being and nothing and time

Are the three dimensions of mind,

Qualia same in sense, not kind,

Is more than a plausible rhyme.

All unquestionable questions

Have been asked, answers propounded,

By men who offer suggestions

As truth — and we are astounded!

But what takes me is the beauty

Of one idea (though not its words,

Elusive as murmuring birds),

A glimpse of my own purity.

Combined they’re an absurdity.

Nothing is found in surety.

Rose-Breasted Grosbeak (John James Audubon), Sonnet #458

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My Human Disguise.

















The grosbeaks war at my backyard feeder,

The males windmilling their black and white

Wings at each other until one relents.

And the female? For now none heed her,

Fueling themselves for the next long flight.

If she left first would they know where she went?

The male’s breast is fuchsia more than rose,

A color less real but iridescent,

A jewel in a ring when the birds’ wings close —

In flight they stir red, black and white air

(Yes, everywhere in nature red is rare).

The first seen in spring seems a miracle

In a yard home of sparrow and grackle.

When they leave they fly with their own free will.

The Story of the Universe, Sonnet #457

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My Human Disguise.









There’s light and its divisibility

Or blackness and invisibility.

We get distant glimpses of genesis,

Stars that could blink out at any second

Or bloom like a lovely woman’s kiss.

No, in our beginning is not our end.

Time is a thrown bone, not an arrow,

Flung end over end, sucked of its marrow.

The story of the universe, begun

Long before the kindling of our sun

Has been acted out, but never told,

A dumbshow of the older growing old.

A boy in leg braces has his star; stares

At it when he can. It is always there.

Note: Photo artwork by the author.