On the other Side of a Strauss Sunset

with Blue Danube stubbornness

i waltz across life’s dance floor

in the arms of fate

living to the fullest before it’s too late

to turn and amble and skate

across the icy moor,

to reach the other side of lightness

gathering you in my arms

feel your breaths ever so slight

it is our night,

and my dress is whirling ever so right

time to disarm death’s cloak

and sublimely soak

in the effervescent moonlight

till the hundredth morning comes to interrupt the song

that has kept me on this earth exactly as long

as i intended to be,

dancing elegantly through the storms

with you,

twirling, holding and loving me.

11/8/o7

Wile E. Coyote’s Ultimatum

it’s a vitamin fortified oxymoron

life’s huge trifles day to day

resound like Grand Canyon echoes

just before we jump into the abyss

come back around to jump again,

like cartoon characters, emotionally flattened

each time, we scrape ourselves off the rock

and live to die again,

stronger till we use up the bottle of resolve,

and the druggist sees fit to close his shop.

God keeps odd hours

or is too drunk to read the prescriptions

because even he can’t stand, in sober state,

to see what we have become

i think i hear second hand voices

on the edge, feel the writers writing me

towards conclusion,

parachute thoughts feel buoyant

but i’m drop kicked before i can open them.

a wayward cartoon character being written out of the script—

free-falling festive fickle festoon

guffawing at sardonic captions

meep meep

meep meep.

erin-cilberto

11/9/o7

Keepsake

off beat,

off my rocker,

i had an amulet

and ran my fingers across

the borders of the life it held

then the core of the charm

felt its inner being inanimate

safe
off beat

off my rocker

i was holding me

the chain broken in so many places

it no longer hung across my heart

but my fingers still felt its pulse

old belongings never die

they just feel like braille photographs

of a mute poet
off beat
off his rocker.

erin-cilberto
11/8/o7

It’s all Relative to Semantic Antics

half-hearted verbs

scoff at

non-descript adjectives shunning the showy flowers

reeling in adverbs’ brisk winds

pronouns mispronounce the conjunctions’ names

prepositionally gifted interjections ace intelligence tests

but fail to exclaim the really important purpose of a noun’s being

which is to

drift through boringly declarative sentences while

articles of self-deprecation upend semi-colon serenity

feel the breeze of the blatantly baffling question marks

and antagonistic antonyms dripping with sarcasm

among gerunds with geriatric reasoning

reassuring the sweet simple sentences

that life is just life is just

“What it Is”

not the complex grouping of thoughts

all the silly commas make it out to be.

erin-cilberto

11/6/o7

the thin line between crazy

the thin line between crazy

and conceited,

the thin line between cozy

and claustrophobic

a thick juicy steak

and the mistakes we make

a grilled silence, invisible smoke

jutting from a desert patio

where the cactus shelter thoughts

like a flaming portfolio

of thorny nature, a biting wind of reminiscence

glows like a porch light upon the deck

where bodachs launch into dance

the thin line between gambol

and gamble

welches the bet of life

and the scent of a last meal

is an aroma drifting into the snow of a torrid

heat to what we owe

that scorches our insides like burnt meat

the thin line between crazy

and too lazy to learn

my emotions burn

closed in by the openness of vague clouds

the thin line between acid rain

and acrid pain

a mirage in the distance

beckons like a hitchhiker on a road less traveled

but we translate into an expelled ember

no longer a reticent member

of

the thin line between sense

and sensibility

we’ve been found out

and dinner’s devolved ashes of a fate

discovered too late.

erin-cilberto

11/3/o7

the Strange Appearance of Parentheses

Daffy Doris was alive once

and she was funny,

but in an uncomfortable way,

her stringy hair and discolored eyes

soothed a block of vagrants

with telekinetic humor

she made Odd Henry laugh buckets of tears

over the years, her paper sack faded and frayed

like the old navy jacket she’d stolen back when she

engaged her own war to stay alive,

the bottle sweating through the bottom of her nerve

even after they found her by the docks, eyes closed to life

door to her spirit shut forever,

shopping cart parked beside her last residence

Water rushing by—

old barges splitting current

trash sprayed with afterthoughts of passers by

flooded with guilt,

the hand they could have lent her cut off at the wrist

a strange twist

moved by a Daffy mind

gone as pale as decomposing skin,

wherein she

wrote a note to Henry on the brown bag stationery

he stuffed into his pocket when he found her,

( the confessions of a pale rider

whose sea covered up her salty lips

she could find secure docking for her ship

in an eternity unbuttoning itself as it ought

from the streets,

moved by careless thought.)

erin-cilberto

11/3/o7

Christmas Morning at Odd’s House

deck the halls with boughs

of poverty,

fa la la la la

red docile suits, fat land

grimy beggars on a sled of rickety existence,

filled with toys from the Manor

hand me down blues

no socks or shoes

just bare lies;

he scrounges for stocking stuffers

to hang on cardboard chimneys

visions of sugar plums dance in Henry’s head

but he sees no Claus

only reindeer dreaming—

wakes up screaming

since

peace is a neighbor’s house away,

climbing down the fire escape

with its hands caught in its pocket

as the rest of God’s children go hungry.

11/3/o7