assignment: write three poems

shipwrecked

even seaspray
scatters
sandmade structures
not fit for
fighting
back. yet

when things
crumble

you’re oblivion

– the violent
pull and
crash of
waves that
ravage shorelines

you fit

perfectly
into all the spaces
between grains

you’re forever

horizon, toying
with ships and seashells
equallyeasily.

drowning’s indiscriminate
for when submerged
all forms fit
equally into you

– remember them

when you count
how many pieces
into which
the wind can shatter me.


-----
Monday Evening Skirmish

Haunted by the ghosts of guilty soldiers,
I appease you with a spurious submission
For if virtue and the truth cannot be soldered,
Duplicity can serve as ammunition

So stake your words against this peaceful smile –
My weapon’s not the treaty that I’ve pled.
And though you think I’ve come to reconcile
You’re conquered by the things I’ve left unsaid.

Yet when you’re forced into conscious surrender
I’m scourged of this obscene penchant for sin.
I realize this is battle I’ve engendered
But so, too, that I never meant to win.

Still, mercy renders warfare obsolete;
Forgiveness can exact its own defeat.


------
Untitled

Some time later, she will still be chained to him
by a gift meticulously chosen and wrapped that will
sit searingly unforgotten and concealed in the back
of her bottom drawer, incarcerated there because of
some falling-out between would-be giver and her
unrealized recipient and because of her religiously daily
failures of courage. Each time she opens the drawer
she will resurrect these words: chance, tomorrow, maybe –
and then murder them once again. Over time, hospital-corner
Scotch tape jobs and carefully curled ribbons lose shape
and color but stubbornly refuse to lose significance.