Poems: January 2004 Archives

BLESSINGS TO DADDY, FROM SOPHOCLES

Your train wheezes into Penn Station
After all the most elegant torque
Of Greece has eaten the skin off its olives
Piglet blessings, dear, blindly offload
See? They pitch, they veer, they don?t see
Some fall stupid on the tracks, they do
Others grip the slats of their failing moment
And won?t let go, must be dragged away

Let?s hang the lot of ?em in a window
Someone, you, was overheard muttering
And then another elegant word or two?
Let?s take some pictures, let?s take me
Dancing among the mysteries, the unexplained
Lessons learned from the flea of Colonus
From that dancing flea: how everyone?s innocent
Who, looking backward, unsees the sea

Here's a version. But a second is under construction . . .

BLESSINGS TO DADDY, FROM SOPHOCLES

I want to kill you
plain and simple
graveyard dead, if I can
you pimple?
so they told me
just now at temple

oh the blood pounds on
it?s like an invasion
along the curvy route
of trivial evasion
Suppose we drink a cup of it
on this wine-dark occasion