by Rick Young | Dec 16, 2017 | Poem
They offed my favorite soap opera character.
He was poisoned and strangled, found dead in a crashed Porsche.
Could have been his mercenary stepfather, mistress, daughter or maid.
He’d recently argued with them all, though not at once.
And his recent heavy drinking problem was getting in the way of his coke abuse.
Maybe it could have been his dealer or the drifter he’d abused at the station.
They found an eight page suicide note, penned by his spurned wife,
pinned to his pant leg by a large kitchen knife. No fingerprints.
Daughter has disappeared with stepbrother. Were spotted on another network.
Maid and mistress, both beautiful, have grown close and whisper a lot.
Evil stepfather is same suit size and has a huge closet. Drifter was in a union.
Could have been his bookie. Horse tranquilizers were found in his blood.
The only ones who cried at the funeral were his wife and the drifter’s lawyer.
by Rick Young | Dec 15, 2017 | Poem
Press the petal to your hand with my heart.
It needs you beyond the mere forest of our limbs.
While bitter tears in barren ground remain,
This seed must grow larger than our sorrow,
Pollinating the dead. Our dreams will rise
In flowers and our fields will join in love.
All the happiness we know will be this earth.
by Rick Young | Dec 15, 2017 | Poem
Later for you, paratrooper.
The dawn just ate your target.
Another war will crop up before nightfall.
Otherwise, what will we do with our tanks?
Somewhere, another terrorist is born.
And a schoolkid shaves his head, anticipating.
by Rick Young | Dec 14, 2017 | Poem
We all elbowed up to the bar,
thinking Sunday/Monday
in a Tuesday kind of way.
On the t.v. came another launching.
Puppets on the railing
gave us shoeshines.
Everyone was thinking entertainment.
We had many colonies to dream of.
All the while the bottles danced with dust.
Rusty old men climbed inside the jukebox.
Sounded like an earthquake stirring pinballs.
Acolytes were washing hands in draft beer.
Someone passed a monkey begging peanuts.
"Witness the dawn," a paranoiac whispered.
And around us, the night crumbled.
by Rick Young | Dec 14, 2017 | Poem
At first there was amorous addition,
soon followed by sexual subtraction.
And then came perverse multiplication,
leading naturally to lewd division.
Some drew the line at pornographic calculus,
after struggling through hot geometry,
Then they put away their slide rules and protractors
and went off on a tangent about the offensive nature
of numbers, how gross they found pi r squared,
and the first time they saw isosceles
in the hypotenuse position. The remainder
is a cube root, to be sure.
