VILLANELLE

The moment passed and I forget

The reason why or what I meant

In the exact instant I let

It go like a blank letter sent

To someone I don’t remember.

Even Now is an old event,

Both a flaming and an ember.

To hold, even touch, is to burn

Like September in December.

It takes but a second to learn,

What no-one else will ever know,

That all I am will soon return

If I stand not still but think slow,

Say nothing, and as if asleep,

Allow myself to come and go.

Instead, I cannot help but leap

Ahead to what’s to come and let

My self reach for what it can’t keep,

Moments I already forget.

The Magic Square (Albrecht Durer), Sonnet #467

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

The summer is an empty hourglass

I tumble through like a clump of sand

That cannot, trying very hard, pass

Through the neck and softly land

At the bulbs’ bottom, top or bottom,

Depending on the hour of the turn.

The asphalts and red bee balms burn

And the sun is a single blazing atom.

The bell has been silent, raising hope

(It all depends on squares and magic

And the diminution of the tragic)

That someday someone will tug on its rope,

Awakening the prayed-for lightning storm

That once our angel promised to reform.

David with the Head of Goliath (Artemisia Gentileschi), Sonnet #466

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

It was no small stone that struck Goliath down,

But as large as the giant’s hand, sling-flung,

God-guided to strike just below the crown,

By a future king, still innocent and young.

The task yet undone, David severed its head

With the Philistine’s sword, though it took loud

Chopping to get through much gristle and bone.

He couldn’t lift what, so heavily dead,

He meant to parade for the cheering crowd,

So he brandished instead the conquering stone.

Such battles now will never disappear.

The weak and poor are every monster’s prey,

Yet live complacently and without fear.

Goliaths behead Davids every day.

Ghosts in the Tree (Franz Sedlacek), Sonnet #465

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

The old crows fly with a graceless hurry

As if dodging barrages of thrown stone,

Retreat to their darkening rookery,

Arriving limp and sated, one by one.

I’ve seen them, uncountable, roosting

In a dead wood in the flooded wetlands,

The rubbing of their wings a dry cooing.

They hunch like bald men without legs or hands,

Some alone, some in groups of two or three.

They don’t seem to need or want each other,

Though most are uncle, father, or brother.

A ghostliness of camaraderie

Lingers, everything cold and indirect,

Extends the way the bare branches connect.

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. 

Library (Franz Sedlacek), Sonnet #463

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

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