Monday, November 18, 2013

Frank C. Praeger- Three Poems

Terms

Chop, chop, chop, gratis til impenetrable;
more than middling, muddled, yet, engaged:
suzerainty dispensed with, 
obscure mislabellings,
and bawdy trysts
reneged on more than jinxed.
So much for fallible texts.

So there are sycophants and who isn't a trial
to those around us,
the children of our elders that have been our companions?
Yes, do denounce uncorroborated comparisons.

So?

Soured? 
No different
than the damaging traffic of time
and that that trampled on feltness,
gauged in gain,
has not gone unnoticed.

Commercial diamonds or shoo-fly pie
demonstrate no lasting power.
A homemade lazy Susan may well help,
not topsy-turvy news that would be final
as autumn mud, denuded trees
are more than representational.

Nor is it to postulate 
alongside migratory flights,
leftover summery somnolences, the furtivenesses of tomorrow. 

Behind the cabs, trucks, buses, came the carriers of signs
anticipated by lackluster hints of now or never.
Placards of total mobilization, 
of a united front against whomever;
placards for every occasion.
A dipsy-doo rejoices.
No further talk or gesture, 

Amenities revoked.



Restrained, Lummoxed, And Relevant
 
Forced,
felt,
and was not briefed.
Who could relent,
who could compel?
No one?
Then, gargantuan effort
failed,
someone's freshness displaced,
an urge restrained,
a withering that would not be stayed,
simple,
reduced.
A tramping commended.
Some imagined 
they were in a play,
grieved the passing of each day.
Indifferently employed
past being lummoxed,
ratcheted up further,
consequential 
as turned over soil.



Congratulate

I want to stop each clock, 
and if I have to be bellicose - 
in my own fashion.
No cigar to celebrate,
no canny catch-all phrase.
I am now where I may have never been,
some park carefully stepping over dog shit,
nor have I thought of anything startling, new,
As for what I have and have not done
I congratulate myself,
no one else has.

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