The following piece is a result of ReadWritePoem’s prompt #84, brought to us from the fantastical mind of Buckeye State poet, Nathan Moore (not to be confused with the Virginian songwriter, Nathan Moore). I can’t explain the prompt in complete detail here, other to say that it involves using a dictionary, and that it was great fun.

PEAS & DOPE

Remember when Tim aimed his peashooter
from the veranda at Sally with her D cups
sunbathing in the yard and launched?

We scattered like a post-traumatic waterfall,
twelve rug rats through the arborvitae
where her father, the self-made senior controller

of his Masonic village, stood from his poker game –
a royal flush at that – and whipped each of us
for castigating the one beautiful thing

his sperm ever made. Remember how the slash
burned the backs of our thighs? Bent over chairs
as the old man sang Yankee Doodle Dandy, we cried

Daddy whenever his belt cracked and belched.
Years later, after an unwarranted search
and seizure put me away for a long weekend,

the sheriff sized up my dreadlocks, said us hippies
had no clue about pain. So I dropped my pants,
let my scars correct him.

The following poem comes from Read Write Poem’s prompt #82 – an ode to homunculus, or “little man”. I blame myself for this prompt. As it stands, the poem is definitely a work in progress – and to think the original draft had to do with a man losing his toe in a lawn mowing incident.

LITTLE MAN OF HEART

What if this song never ends? If we stay long past
the DJ breaking his tables, the rest of the dancers
gone home, the lights turned out, the sky’s lights
done the same? Even the moon – full tonight –
clouded away so everything we know goes black?

I have my eyes closed in this moment. I don’t know
if these what ifs are true. The music still goes.
There are clod steps on the parquet floor.
A breeze through a window says there’s light left,
as if daytime breezes differ from those of night.

Between us, where no space slips through skin to skin,
there are at least three heartbeats – yours, mine,
and some other. I can’t say what it is. A thing borne
from our centers, borne of music and light that will
walk us home when we wake.

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