Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never been that person who’d do anything to get ahead. I have principles. Everyone knows I have principles. And I stick to them, even when it’s hard.
receding arrears panic
when disruptions concealed
their lost awe
to abdominal radar
Roberta Feins commands these sensual lines with grace, simplicity and feminine caress. She makes the sensual spiritual, through food and cloth, a commanded indulgence that suggest that all feeling starts with skin and tongue, and withers with time.
There was an America
of red brick with limestone trim.
It was small, overcrowded,
and stood, in upper New York Bay,
at the edge of that other vast America.
Besides, he thinks, changing your name legally to “Spider-Man” is stupid. Spider-Man is a popular character consumed by the masses for no good reason and to no good end. There is nothing special, risky or meaningful about such a move.
His mother let him out of the car and he raced inside. It was time for Yogi Bear. As the sky darkened, he watched Yogi Bear, he watched Pixie and Dixie and he watched Huckleberry Hound. The cartoon characters and their ironic dilemmas confounded him.
In this Paris neighborhood
I read a book on The Resistance
to strengthen my poor French.
As I close the book the sun starts to set
Beneath soft skies and damp wrapped mountains
old men now bundled in earth against this cold
are fading memories of their war
like sepia photographs lost in attics
Are you breathing? The breeze is blowing shadows of the leafy branches over you, which creates the illusion of movement. I bend over you, and say, Sir, are you all right?. No response. I say it again, four more times, louder each time. No response.
We tend to expect a lot of pretense from poetry: fancy language that makes for unreadable lines. Pieces of writing so pseudo-intellectual or obtuse that they can only be qualified as Machiavellian ploys to satisfy the author’s ego.
