I have both searched and had these pieces sent to me in the hopes of them being posted on my webpage. I admit, however, that these few poems happen to be some of the better ones I have received. Please, enjoy at your leisure and submit anything you may have done yourself!

Superman
I know you think that things
will always be the same: I'll rinse
out your tights, kiss you good-bye
at the window, and every few weeks
get kidnapped by some stellar goons.

But I'm not getting any younger,
and you're not getting any older.
Pretty soon I'll be too frail
to take aloft, and with all those
nick-of-time rescues, you're bound
to pick up somebody more tender
and just as ga-ga as I used to be.
I'd hate her for being 17 and
you for being...what, 700?

I can see your sweet face as you read
this, and I know you'd like to siphon
off some strength for me, even if it
meant you could only leap small buildings
at a signle bound. But you can't,
and, anyway, would I want to
just stand there while everything
else rushed past?

Take care of yourself and of the world
which is your own true love. One day
soon, as you patrol the curved earth,
that'll be me down there tucked in
for good, being what you'll never be
but still

Your friend,
Lois Lane

Ron Koertge

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You wrote about yellow cocktail music and the green light on Daisy's dock,
You said it was always 3:00 O'clock in the morning and that there were no second acts in American life, That the rich are different from you and me--and sex always ends in mortal strife.
Your vision was Keatsian sensual,
Your dialogue visible to the ear--
But when did you begin to see your leaf was in the sere? That you were lost--no longer free to be the person you could be.
Gatsby was great; Zelda was not
And Hemingway said how dry was your rot.
Yet the words that you wrote were a movement in time To exist in the ether of brazen sublime.
The 30's subsumed you; the country forgot
That you were a wordsmith while millions were not.
When you died in the forties and nobody came
A bottle of Scotch was reserved in your name--
And now every year in the month of September
It's poured on your grave so we will remember
That the angels that brought you will not come again
To waltz in blue gardens with God's borrowed pen

Patricia Claire Eggleston

Elegy for Margaret
Cradled in pine and clay

Shrunk to so small a scale

Hard to believe that yesterday
No wall of flesh or stone
Could hold you prisoner

A giant in your kingdom
You strode the landscape
Roaring among pygmies
Although your charm was legendary

But now the darkness
Rocks you in its peace
And locks you in this narrow cell

Hard to believe that yesterday
No wall of flesh or stone
Could hold you prisoner

Yet surely you'll break free
From this dark place
(From womb or tomb unfettered fall or fly)
Be born again

Cradled in pine and clay

Shrunk to so small a scale

Richard Henry

Last Wishes Of A Seafaring Man
Scatter my ashes on the sea
And as I float on crested wave
I want no tears or grief for me
Or duty visits to my grave.....
Don't bury me beneath the ground
No cold imprisoned tomb for me
Or headstone with an Earthy mound
That's not the place I'd want to be.
It's where the winds blow fresh and free
I know that I will lie content
The sea I love my cemetery
The waves my only monument.....

Dulcie Levene

The Thistle And the Rose
Well, the evening saunters slowly to an ending,
as a waitress clutters tables with upturned chairs,
The guy at the piano takes his tip jar and his beer,
as the few lost souls remaining wander slowly off in pairs.

And the owner calls out loudly, "Gents, it's time please. Could you finish off your pints, and drink'em down.
I've a wife at home and family I don't see enough;
So we'll see you all tomorrow, if God's willing;
drink'em down."

There's a bouncer down from Yorkshire by the exit;
I'm smiling at his words I can't translate.
And a pretty little lass hands me my coat and cap and scarf, as her boyfriend snarls severely, "Come on lad, it's gettin' late."

Two hours ago this place was really jumping,
as waitresses with trays spilled beer and swore:
the smoky smell of laughter wrapped around us,
as the guy at the piano gladly matched our cries
for "More!"

A comradeship of strangers for an evening -
if we didn't know the words, we'd hum out loud,
and down our pints then loudly order others;
as a group of lonely strangers, for a moment, became a crowd.

In this company of Crusoes we're all equal;
seek some friendship here to while away the hours.
Why stay homebound when the bed you sleep in's empty:
We're all looking for an answer, but the question's never found.

So we go down to the Local to forget some -
might get lucky with a lady, if she's easy -
Buyin' rounds with the men, and soon everyone's your friend;
but no one knows your name tomorrow evening.

The embers in the fire are slowly dying,
as I turn my back and hear the door slam, locked.
Another evening over at my Local,
now all I hear's my footsteps as they echo down the
block

But I think that I might come again tomorrow,
to share a piece of life with commonn souls
who know the knocks and graces life can deal us,
the best and worst, served noon till late,
at the Thistle and the Rose.

Simon Paterson

Snapshot
Through an open skylight I listen to the leaves chattering across a windy evening. I sit in the lamplight contemplating words, my fingers moving quietly on the keyboard, dark letters appearing

on a white field. White. White. As a child I would sometimes repeat a word endlessly to myself, until its meaning seemed to slip quietly away, leaving only a husk of empty sound.

My father regards me from a photograph taken a year before he died, still handsome at sixty-three, though starting to display an impending hollowness, an emptying-out around the eyes.

At times I imagine that his expression shifts subtly, that he watches me across memory, sometimes with reproach, sometimes amused, sometimes with a kind of patient recognition.

In a diary, during the war, he wrote of a dream he had in Burma: that his parents, dead even then, had beckoned him from the other side of a stream. As he was about to leave the bank he stood on, he awakened.

What is this bank I stand on now, watching a snapshot for readable traces? A parapet of matter in a liquid motion of union and division that I might one day step from, slipping away in clear and wordless
water?

Garry McFeeter

home / plays / next page