Tag Archives: pop culture

You and I Will Know: April 2015 PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day Seven, and a Program Note

Hold me closer, Tony Danza, tell me
what’s on every last bit of your mind.
Call me a taxi if I’ve said too much

on the talk show you still host, even now,
in the darkened conversation pit here
in your apartment, under all the

framed photos of you and Judith Light.
People say I look something like her,
Tony, and the other good thing is

I’ll never make you ask it, the question
that defines and haunts you, years later.
You and I, dear, you and I will know.

Also, I’m pretty sure I’m going to miss the next three days of the two challenges I’m doing, and will catch up later. I have some travel coming up, and while I can write under those circumstances, it’s often not the best.

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Reality Show: April 2015 PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day Six

And Greg in his Johnny Bravo suit
tells you how he’s really not all that

fabulous

without his five siblings,
three of whom are really

stepsisters

(but no one seems to talk about that
beyond the first episode or two)

and really, if you want to get
right down to it, all of them
are actors, and at least

one of them will hate another one
someday, and several will write
insiderish books that contradict
each other on a few key points.

But now, all of them
gather on the Astroturf lawn,

assembled in pixels on your screen
as if waiting for you to acknowledge
just how real they are—sometimes,
more than people you know.

Sometimes, more than you.

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Let Me

 

Let me be your friend who
keeps you in touch with

pop music.

Let it now be known that
I do not hate

pop music.

I know I should call it
inane and corporate,

pop music.

But in any car,
it’s all I want,

pop music.

How about your car?
Will your radio play

pop music?

Let me hop in,
let me turn it up loud,

roll my windows down and cruise
oo la la, that’s what I like
you’re the one I want
I know you want it
I love it

pop music.

 

 

 

Is it Tuesday p.m.? Check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

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Shallows

I only swim where my belly grazes the bottom;
I only fly on the lowest air currents I can reach.
I never stretch for anything, never look at
anything unpleasant. I leave those

logic puzzles to the philosophers; who cares
about how the world works, and life, or all
those questions that you can’t turn off?
It all hurts my head; that’s why I stay

here, above it all (but just barely), bobbing
on ginger ale bubbles and celebrity gossip,
both of which I get piped in daily, so I
don’t even have to leave my house,

the place where I am always the prettiest,
the brightest and the best. I always wear
an attitude T-shirt, even when there’s
no one here to read it, so I go into

my mirrored closet, shut the door, talk
to myself about myself, for as long as
it takes to convince myself that I’m
OK, that it’s OK, it’s all OK now.

 

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 25. The prompt was to write a poem that is the opposite of one we wrote earlier this month. A couple of days ago, I wrote this one called Depths.

 

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