Ralph Monday- A Poem

August, Christmas & Black Holes

Driving in August Dog days listening to

Christmas music. Pumpkins on the side of the

road and I just bought a Halloween sign at

Big Lots.

Can’t tell one season from the next anymore.

Religious believers say it’s a sign that Jesus

is coming.

I say it’s a sign that the only place the 18th

century can be found any longer is riding on a

rocket ship or in a stethoscope, and it ain’t

coming back.

Old mountain folk say to count the heavy

fogs in August to know how many winter

snows will come, and how much wood to

cut.

Those signs are a dying breed, sucked in

by the Beatles, Derrida, Foucault, that whole

death of reason carnival that gathered gravity

like a black hole at the center of a galaxy till

an entire culture has been vacuumed in.

What do we have now? A freak show with the

media as ring man, a plotless story so bad that

even it can’t be deconstructed, a place where the

inmates give therapy to the masses.

So look for the signs, any sign, that a hair crack

is flying through air.


Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 50 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book Empty Houses and American Renditions was published May 2015 by Aldrich Press. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer was published June 2015 by Odin Hill Press.