Next

I do not think I have ever

spent a day without at least

a gorgeous moment in which

I am afraid of someone, present

or not, or past or present or future.

There or not.  The former air base

(what a concept - air base) then

nuclear-air-base (more conceptual

still?) is going to be the site for

the city's new high school.  No one

seems overly concerned about how

much of who-knows-what was

dumped there over four decades.

Bob Wright said some stoves and

refrigerators and early computers and

all sorts of stuff were just thrown

into a landfill (what a concept -land-

fill) there by the govt.  Bob Wrong

says nothing of this sort was done,

was done, was done.  And then the latter

takes vitriolic aim at someone less

fortunate.  The shorts are tighter

this year on the married men and

the married women.  There is a

new philosophy in new trees.

*

MY ANSWER IS THE SAME AS THE PERSON IN FRONT OF ME

Once I lived in a town about as big as this room.

Houses leaned this way and that in the sun.

If and when lived to be eighty years old or so

they made smallish paintings with sometimes

simple black or red marks near the faces of

their self portraits. If women reached eighty

they tended to walk suddenly out of doors on

high sun days. They would disappear in unmysterious

ways. People stayed inside at other times crying

for beginnings. But words were coming from fear for

so long the crying was short and uneventful and even

quiet: six or seven views of the same sand bar or

the same point or the same mask or the same once.

*

The Military

I woke up this a.m. and I felt

lousy - lonely too. In one dream

it was my turn to talk at a

12-step meeting, and just as I did

more than half the people got up

and left. Fifteen minutes is a lot

to a flea. But how would I know

for sure? I said I was a success

story. I didn't take credit, I spoke

of other hills and vistas. Maybe

my tone was lonely. I also dreamed

that frogs who knew I loved creatures

so much they would simply attach

themselves to me when they saw me

coming - and a lovely very smallish

green bird alighted on and off from

my finger as I walked around a town -

this was lovely and light but then the

dream had a slight portent sense to it

- and when I e-mailed this portion of

the dream, to two friends, I closed

with the joke of "a broken record poem" -

then the dream had a slight portent

sense to it / then the dream had a slight

portent sense to it / then the dream...

Soon you won't be able to sound like a

broken record. You can't sound like a

broken tape, or a broken CD, or can you?

**

Michael Burkard is the author of My Secret Boat (Norton), Entire Dilemma and Unsleeping (both with Sarabande). Poems appear in recent or forthcoming issues of APR, Parakeet, Court Green, 32 Poems, Smartish Pace, and Shade.

Archived at http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/burkardm_poems.htm