StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XIII, No. XXVI

I am here,
Inside,
Within me,
Occasionally lost
Within my skull and thoughts,
No smarter than I ever was,
An occupier of temporal space
And decaying flesh
Struggling to exist.

There is the world,
There is the universe inside
Across a drawbridge
I often find raised,
An internal cosmos
Not of my making
That I wander aimfully
Like some self-absorbed sibyl
Recently grown unfamiliar
With the spoken word.

As I leave the house I still want
To turn the television to Animal Planet,
For Cedar to watch for companionship
When we leave him alone.

We forget and say let's plan to have dessert
When we're through walking the dog after dinner,
So much of our life revolved around the three of us,
Just two doesn't seem nearly enough.

The air conditioner struggles against humidity,
Feeling more swamp cooler than A. C.,
A bad omen this soon in the summer,
Portending a particularly ugly August and July
Before September begins to fall.

Fond memoried summer, a product of childhood,
Grows oppressive on the daily commute;
The bright sun outside my window
Serves no purpose but to remind me
The ocean is half-a-day away.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (June 2012)

The Dragon lifts, spreads its wings,
Carries its cargo to the space station,
Free Enterprise going
    where no government dares go,
Timid followers of passing fancy
    as they are.
    
Tomorrow belongs to the brave and daring,
Willing to risk both life and money,
One by one we will live in space,
    On planets close and distant,
While the government continues to parse
    its narrowly envisioned universe.

I can't stand the silence, the sound of no footsteps,
No clatter of claws across the kitchen floor,
No lapping of water at three A. M.,
No jostling for dinner an hour before we eat,
No eagerness and excitement after dinner
When we three would often walk along the treeline
While he tracked deer and other creatures of the woods.
The silence rips at me, murdering any chance at sleep,
The darkness surrounds me and I the darkness
As I count the hours left until sunrise.

At seven-oh-nine summer arrives
As the ballgame begins to begin,
Stephen Strasburg as hot as the temperature,
One hundred miles per hour Farenheit.

We're so sorry we killed your kid,
We've suspended the people responsible,
But you were born a woman after all
And days like this should be expected;

This is modern China, the bright light of Asia,
But this was, of course your second child,
One over the limit for proper family planning,
And you had no money to pay your fine;

We regret any inconvenience we caused you,
We have removed all the appropriate witnesses,
So if you can gather six thousand dollars,
We'll not terminate your next pregnancy.

Obama Amok

He's gone all Nixon on us, momma,
With Executive Privilege and an Attorney General
All run amok and out of control;
We dearly want our presidents to succeed
But Carteresque moralizing and passing the buck
Are no substitute for good governance.