The inmates laugh and smoke
Read the same page over and over
Blue jigsawed sky turns slowly under idle fingers;
Out there, the sky
Is a hole at the top of a wooden well
Concrete pasture
Littered with sun bleached butt ends.
You watch from inside someone else’s face
Hypnotized and wary.
No visitors.
She appears beside you
A butterfly on your windshield
Laceless sneakers for a passport
“All I want to do is cut myself,” she whispers;
Do it
Cut your damn guts out and leave me alone.
PARENT AND CHILD
Pain is anger’s mother
Betrayal her father
Never judge a child
Until you have met her parents
GUYS
Look
She said
I know how guys are
(Like describing the taste of moldy bread)
They're always after it
Always
Trying to get into it
And never knowing what to do with the damn thing
Once you let them have it
AUDIENCE
"I will not be your audience
I will not stand by and applaud
Your life's performance"
how could she have known
how much the player ached
for one face alone
her tears
her smile among the crowd
POORE DICK
Two discontented lovers rudely stampped,
Unfinished, sent before our time to bedde;
In crookebacked love, wee lye together,
Twisted shadowes ‘neath the azure Moon.
Darke reminders of the damage done;
Undonne by bloody letters on life’s page,
While on the stage, a trail of murders guides
Our stumbling steps, toward our fatale end.
Here in our woeful bedde, your nightmare haunts -
Our dreams of youthful joy despair and die:
You cry aloud as I sob silently,
O mournful pendulum; Love ticking by.
Have mercy Jesu! I would give my kingdome
For a Harte Unbroken.
DECREE
Cables that might have held the bridge
Another twenty-five years
Broken and dangling;
A single thread of ink,
A judge’s curled name
Blowing across the bottom of a page
MENDING
Incising slow and deep
The surgeon took the flesh until at last
Only the nerve remains
Burning in the open air
Waiting for the medicine of time.
Now that the cutting is finished,
Do I dare ask you to stay
Until the wound has healed again?
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