All the More Reason to Start

No, no, no!  This is no time to start that

trade war with your past lives.  Or to stand

bereft as an old man who's forgotten

his pants, while this squalid house squats on its

haunches and waits.  You have a deep ringed mind

fermented like spirits in an oak barrel. 

Carrying on with all the artistry of

an old sinner, between the ferris wheel

and the wrecking ball, you can surely

find something just shy of a meaning.

Work out that incantation in the park.

Don't wash your laundry.  Strike your gong and

drive away the evils.  A busy buzzing

world may not want to hear you, but I do.

Leaving

Leaving only their absence,

they pack the rest in the wagon

under the flopping canvas

and waddle westward, slow as the solstice,

fed by what heaven they can hold.

Almost there, on the mountain,

the white snow covers any thought of return;

each man or woman

silently plodding into the passage,

drinking water that burns the throat,

with hair so cold it snaps,

and hands clinging to stomachs,

and stomachs clinging to vertebrae,

and vertebrae clinging to nothing.

There are stars that seem to gather for such journeys.

And planets in retrograde across the ecliptic.

We may imagine visions and purposes.

But the reason is always that one hunger,

the one never named.  That simple need to be

Perry L. Powell lives and writes in College Park, Georgia. His work has appeared in The Heron's Nest, Ribbons, Prune Juice, A Hundred Gourds, Indigo Rising, The Foliate Oak, Lucid Rhythms, The Lyric, Haiku Presence, Quantum Poetry Magazine, and The Camel Saloon.