Modern Poet

   

20 November 2022

 

Becoming

The ghost of you still enchants

The ancient ruins of my soul.

I cannot stop this,

I cannot help this,

This that has us faltering

Has become our deformity.

It is an ever thinning slice of good.

I am uncollected liquid sorrow.

Today's mystery's unsolved tomorrow

As love decays from clay to dust,

Dust which rose to smoke the sun.

I heave with agony for us.

Between tremors of consciousness,

A ripple of genuine angst,

A monument of unchanged things,

At last we've become a timing tragedy.

Yet in my befuddled mind

Comes to ripen your smile.
What we believe no longer matters

Until sacred valor pushes to a head

And with some cosmic luck

We might instead

For just a spell rely on happiness.

Keith Leparulo

GBY

Debris Field

Kicking around the kitchen trash

and dragging a cigarette,

you're exhausted with yourself.

It's been so long since

first love raptured you.

Entangled in each other's arms

you drifted together above the skyline,

toe-tipping skyscrapers  

with a big, fat cantaloupe smile

plastered across your juicy face.

Someone you passed in produce today

said it was good to see you 

as they remarked about your gain of weight.

I don't sleep like a secret anymore.

The window above the kitchen sink

captures good sunlight in the morning.

Sometimes I stare out that window

and I think about an old bus 

I saw deep in the woods upstate.

I think about where it's been

and who was on it.

I took one last turn from nowhere

to recall the words I once learned,

to the words of ersatz and schadenfreude,

to the words of ersatz and schadenfreude.

Keith Leparulo

GBY

Closer to the Struggle

By God lament the times good men go down

Departing from this world before they should,

Moments shy receiving their Earthly crown.

Orphans a' downing, you weary flight's found,

Landing, time to roost in this neighborhood.

By God lament the times good men go down.

The moribund heart hollers with no sound.

Reality's always misunderstood.

Why can we not receive our Earthly crown?

Why are we always love where death is found?

Will you take yourself away if you could?

By God lament the times good me go down.

Wither shins can turn us no more around.

Take up His battered Cross of splintered wood.

Indeed, He receives His Heavenly crown.

Now at my behest hold this hallow ground.

They come no less for blood by brotherhood.

By God lament the times we all go down

All ways shy to receive our Earthly crown.

Keith Leparulo

GBY

Digs a Criminal Hole

Since we moved here one appliance after

Another hampers us.  I never stopped

To think that the kitchen sink could back up

Like it did after my wife's last soi disant

Dinner party: meatloaf, her specialty.

I feel their ridicule now as they

Take their educated selves back home.

I think of this as I clear the table,

As I lose myself in speculation.

He's judged the wall-to-wall in the bathroom.

She's aghast the hostess displayed her Chia

Pet prominently near the Amway products.

That meatloaf was only the spark, her mouth

That she couldn't seem to shut damaged deep.

Wherefore methinks near by she skulks now?

I don't know what the hell she's thinking

Flapping away as though I listen.

Rather I employ a stock rotation of

Interjections and words like, "Wow! Really? 

No kidding! and Huh."  But now this damn

Kitchen sink has backed up her way to the

Overspill line.  And just in time I fixed

The problem with the help of a plunger

And a snake slithering inside the trap

While the other trap ran at the same time.

I wish I could be blunt and forthcoming

Sooner. That is no option. Daydreaming

Around her is, and that is good for her.

The drain gurgled, percolated, and choked 

And why not?  Since this cursed domicile

Festooned with her garbage in decorum

Drains my pockets of every single penny.

I should have stopped this before it started.

My Turkey Tornado would've been the bull's eye.

But now her blatherskite finds a backdoor inside

My head and I'm powerless to stop it.

The lukewarm permeating soap water

Gently coaxed apart the meatloaf into

Pieces leaving behind soggy sponges

You can't fetch a rat to eat. In the middle

Of the sink a whirling vortex formed. 

I saw the greasy water being sucked

Away until the silvery bottom

Shone through.  Silverware became uncovered

Like stranded shells after the tide creeps out

Behind the ocean. I found peculiar

Shiny convex shovels beside little

Yet straight inflexible silver clam rakes.

Caught between transitions, lodged perfectly

In that aging vertical steel throat, I

Found a knife.  I saw it sticking down her

Like a tongue depressor, gagging the back, 

Of her throat, enticing her to vomit.

Her constant prattle provoked me

To a critical time, and I wondered

How am I with this meatloaf making woman?

I dripped with pruned fingers until I heard

The last of the sink drain.  It sounded like

The guttural gasping of someone whose

Reddening face twists above ten fingers

And the swollen pipeline of their blue jugular.

Keith Leparulo

GBY

Destroyer Class

God gave in so we could impress ourselves

Not unlike other kids out there dating

Ethereal in perfect love and health

With nothing but us at all relating.

Before I blubber I have this to show

When I recall us in that summer field,

Making you limp shone by your afterglow.

Oh! How we ignored reason for appeal.

Because we didn't know the cost of dreaming,

Because you had to be on your back screaming,

I lumber through town in our car going

To fetch some provisions at your behest.

Stolen away by women, legs flowing,

I recall diapers so going to town is best.

Keith Leparulo

GBY

Crossroad

Ahead the road unfolds like a ribbon.

Some cruise while others haul.

Those who still drive use this time to think.

Should good thoughts arrive between points A and B,

Then it's learned why a thing is a thing the way it is.

Don't let it slip unbeknownst

The road may not yield this privilege.

Beware this sign of falter

For madness arrives when sense making goes out the window.

Nothing matters after going flat this way.

Nothing here furnishes you with a reason

Needed to make an understanding possible.

Unhappy when said the road is not your friend

You become aware that nothing bothers to confront you

Beside the statement of passing small towns at dusk

Before vanishing inside some black horizon

Below a moon that only seems to be following you.

Keith Leparulo

GBY

Preservation

Cooled by the presence of night

And heated by the soul of the day

The skin of the desert floor in her unstoppable way

Opened up her diamond shaped pours

And breathed me into a point

Only to stretch me out again.

I was deliriously delivered, yellow and withered.

I was slick with something.

I remember looking down on myself.

Under a waxing gibbous. My body was pruned.

I was dark and dried like beef

As I writhed around on the surface of a mustard landscape.

My new vision took me beyond her typical forms,

The fleeting oasis, the tireless camel.

Sometimes I go down and shift with the plates.

I carve up a ridge and see a layered cake of compressed time.

I scratch my dreams in her sand.

Cooled by the presence of night

And heated by the soul of the day

I remain leathered.

Just remember when it's your time.

Take only what you need

And know when it's time to let go

So when you heave with pain

On the alter of Earth

You will remember how I left my voice

In the shrill of a hawk.

Keith Leparulo

GBY

A Beginning

The broken heart so old and tired

Ticks hypnotically heavy.

It defies awakening anew.

After first love jilted you

You had to kidnap a friend

Who strove to keep up 

With your streetscape march.

Your embittered rant ran on block after block.

Milkshakes and french fries remedy

That stupid gift of a broken heart.

Perhaps you would prefer facing the ocean

Alone under a sunset sky. As you sit

Your toes dig in the sand,

And you rest your chin on your knees.

So many have come before you.

He made you ennui resonate in college--

The full professor, long tenured.

He admonished your classmates, too,

From fucking around with it, idiom and cliche.

Swapping out pronouns like partners

Requires a fine surgical touch.

It is I who am the one awkwardly existing for not-

Not being afraid to seek love. Again.

That bravado belongs to those who

Hang it out there;

To they who deign, a rarefied breed

Born to be better than you,

Or the kind who are foolish for giving

Just to give, ipso facto.

I ran the numbers. Few among them

Dwell in moribund tribes.

At the very least, you feel and fell to know

Satisfaction-in shakes hands firmly

With sorrow going-out.

So simple that I have no conceit.

Because I do not feel or care,

Because I cannot feel or care.

I am supposed to swallow little yellow pills

That will fix me.

Tacit decorum even prohibits

My coming to you with this.

I have no reason.

You lose a limb in battle?

How about a baby to leukemia?

Yet here I am.  Nobody asked.

They never do.

How much less than regular I am

Takes an astronomer and a shit load of pills.

I am, in fact, currently living,

But that is only a technicality.

An End

Keith Leparulo

GBY

My grandmother wrote this poem for her son, Roger.

Lines to Roger from you Loving Mother

My well-beloved son,

yours is the Beatnik class;

the mores you embrace

are pointed shoes that will surpass

the shoes of your confrere;

anathema, all else but wavy duck-tailed hair.

The pants a shiny black -- your coat of mail

their incrusted dirt;

the complement, an also shiny, black, metallic-threaded shirt.

You "make out" now; it supersedes "to flirt."

To you a girl is not a girl -- she's "cool,"

or else she's just a "skirt."

We were Gibralter-bred:

Ruled by old maxims, spanked . . . (pre-astronaut)

Now suddenly why do our nerves go taut

at sight of uncut, unwashed, spongy, fungus beard.

And why should we crawl in a pigeonhole called "weird?"

Supposedly, we made the world a better spot to live

We learned inexorably it is not far better to receive than give,

But at this point I've had far more than I can stand

And so before I grasp the cat-o'-nine-tails in my hand,

you'd better learn a few sane, timeless rules to mind,

or, unprogressively, I'll belt your big, fat, bare behind

Love,

Mother