Perry L. Powell- Three Poems

A Last Litany

This morning: take the smell of coffee brewing.

Or something in the way we norm and grasp.

The taste of salty tears.  A taste of honey.

A swim in the night to earnestness.

And another place I have only glimpsed.

That hole the meteor dug for us. Last night.

And your fear of falling. Going against the rain.

With a need to know how forgetfulness...

As we come home to where I was always going.

Home to where we have never been.  Again.

How will you take me there? And why now?

And why do I feel the touch of warm fingertips?

Now a flash of blue across the midnight sky.

Gives you what I wrote that night before dying.

And Again

Little time to find something worth saying like

tears swept away in a river,

jawbreakers from the box, or

all the reasons for the journey we made.

Such miseries may not be borne

or as constructive as a secret affair

or finding the power cord at hand

for the ones coming after.

A hundred years later

we still count the days.

And the twisted metal

still glows in a morning sun.

Annunciation

The mustard colored snow of spring covers

everything.  A swarm of gnats glimmer

in the sun like fairy dust.  With fingers

rusting in daylight, an old man (who takes

too many pills) considers the nothing

that remains after all the divisions. 

Not Lord Byron swimming the Hellespont. 

He holds few sticks to throw against the storms

to come.  Having draped a curtain across

the times, he is relieved as a busy

man excused from jury duty.  And if

he awaits a singularity that

never comes, what then? Simply that light?

Or just another worrying folk tune?

Bio

Perry L. Powell is a systems analyst who lives and writes near Atlanta, Georgia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in 50 Haikus, A Handful of Stones, A Hundred Gourds, Atavic Poetry, Black Mirror Magazine, Dead Snakes, Decades Review, Deep Water Literary Journal, Frogpond, Haiku Presence, Indigo Rising, Lucid Rhythms, Mobius The Journal of Social Change, Poetry Pacific, Poetry Quarterly, Prune Juice, Quantum Poetry Magazine, Ribbons, small stones, Stone Highway Review, The Bactrian Room, The Blue Hour, The Camel Saloon, The Credo, The Foliate Oak, The Heron's Nest, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Lyric, The Mind[less] Muse, The Rotary Dial, Turtle Island Quarterly, vox poetica, and Wolf Willow Journal.