Musty Heart

I shouldn’t have opened the door
(I decided I couldn’t take it anymore)
Shouldn’t have flung open my heart
(She said she would just come once more).
Left again, leaving me all ripped apart.
Not knowing the reason: a scrabbling on the roof?
I just had to go and see this storm’s proof,
Now gelled into rent and hidden autumnal leaves
Akin to slighted tricks up magicians’ sleeves.
No time like now, like the present, some day or this hour–
The gravity of the empty not knowing drags with such majestic power.

I shouldn’t have opened this, my old man’s prison door,
But creatures such as we must go out and must explore.

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What would Ferena Ashbury say on National Poem Day?

It was one of those determined, inquisitive, tussle-headed boys;
Should she hazard a kiss to find out what he knows?
Dropping down from the Queen’s Tree on Honeysuckle Ridge
Sally Gossamer Wingstep bussed him one right on the nose!
First crinkled into asterisks, then the eye lids slid wide open.
The boy got up from his bedroom willow copse,
While Sally regarded safely from behind a toadstool—
A lad all alone out here? Where’s his Pops?
A half-walk whistle slung low caught her sharp ear:
Sally saw Evelyn over by the ‘Herroyalship’s Tree’.
Sally whipped over to her cousin’s hideaway.
Alright, so now we caught-lost number three.
Evelyn Eagle Wingtip was shaking like a leaf;
“What’s ever is the matter, Eve?
Why are you in such so evident grief?”
“Oh Sally, that boy chased me all morn.
He followed me into our fairie dome;
Now he is oh, so, so lost
And cannot find his way home.”
Sally then thunk some deep thoughts—
Then, smiling, beamed, “Not to worry!
We’ll just call upon our own sage fairie
And spin a spell taught by our Ferena Ashbury!”
Arm and wingarm together they spun
Ascatterin’ fairy dust and achanting as one:

“Take us where the willows glow,
Away from thy Darkness know.”

The boy wheeled and then headed back towards camp
Missing the fairies shrieking glee of joy.
Twas an older spell for the fairly Lost:
Kitten, pony, or overly-determined little boy.
Sally and Eve flew off, soaring on up high
Back to their own warm abodes in Fairie Dome;
Happy the boy was headed in the right way,
And they too were safe, aheaded home.

–thanks to Lillian Patricia Perkins Fedoroff for loaning me Ferena Ashbury
(and a line or two) as a character for this poem for National Poem Day 2015

A Simple Mind

In this place of tattered expectations,
The old novice at last did rise,
Hours before the dawn
When stars still ruled the skies.

Disdainful of mocking glances,
And all who’d dare criticize,
Piffle stooped to sit at table
To chance last night’s left over sprout pies.

When Master arrived after dawn,
The novices chanted their obeisance;
Twas aged beyond any reason
For such death defied any and all sense.

“You’ve nothing to fear at all!”
A grievous, now proved, lie oft told:
The young novice had been annihilated,
And Master’s now twice time too old.

But Piffle knew the dread secret
Of why PanWren had passed from life—
As he had chanted the dire incantation
His mind slipped to a memory of a wife.

Piffle swallowed hard at the held image
Of the foolish novice smoldering away,
Shattering the apprentice’s soft held thought
That today had been an ordinary day.

Escaping from his thoughts to the catacombs
The old novice took up his rusted quill pen:
“Treat not lightly with the Dark and the Dire
Or loved ones you won’t live to see again!”

The stars again claimed their kingdom,
Though sleep failed Piffle entirely—
The grounds grizzled raccoon high aloft,
Skittering a chant from the old Squire Tree:

“When thou doth play risk in life’s hocus pocus,
T’would much profit thee to never lose focus!”