Lines of Demarcation

By Joseph Hesch

Surrounding us in every direction, limned
in every possible form, these boundaries
and borders, these lines of demarcation.
We can barely step away from them,
they’ve  so entrapped and squeezed our lives.
Do we draw them to keep others away
or to keep our respective enclaves
of body, mind and soul within?

Strokes of natural and man-made
geography, you mountains, oceans,
rivers, borders, colors, words on a page,
the signatures conscribing them against us,
are constructs that have lost their
constricting hold on this lacerated heart,
this freed mind, this scarred but open soul.

Each day, I look into blazing dawn’s

bright smile blurring and erasing
so many margins long marking my reserve,
my captivity. I know I can cross them now,
like they’re maps strewn across the floor,
mere cursive Ts in my notebook.
This syllogism may be false, but I’m a man
of many faults on the run to the next dawn.


We're linking this poem up to dVerse Poets Pub's Open Link Night, hosted by the incomparable Joy Ann Jones (You may know her as @Hedge_witch). Stop by and let Hedge pour you a tall one and mingle with some of the poetic clientele.

Empties

By Joseph Hesch

Walking through the old neighborhood,
full of derelict buildings and derelict souls, 
my head down against the December wind, 
I spied the shiny bit of sidewalk flotsam,
an empty bottle whose ice-blue label read
Crystal Palace Vodka.
Diamonds of ice sparkled within,
survivors of this vessel’s manifest

before it ended up on the rocks

or straight to the bottom.

It reminded me of finding such empties 

of temporary anesthesia in my youth.

More often than not, they were green bottles 
the abandoned shells of Thunderbird wine.

These days it seems even the street alkies,

have gone big time, drinking the same hooch

as higher class drunks, only with no olive.

I kicked the bottle from my path, and found

even more change to these tippling times-- 

the Palace empty wasn’t crystal.

Rather, it was made of plastic.

Of course it was. 
As I and my reverie 
stalked further up the street,

we came upon another empty,

green like those old bottles of T-bird.

This one was a child’s mitten

perched on a snowpile.

I wasn’t sure if it was waving

hello to the new world

or goodbye to the old, 
so I put it in my pocket and 
together we escaped this one.

Hiding in Plain Sight II

By Joseph Hesch

I have reached a point at the final crest
of this autobiographic thrill ride,
before the long slow descent to its end,
where I can look back and see
how much of it I’ve missed
by being the close-eyed loner in this seat,
the dust-shrouded outsider,
the look-no-hands clown,
the genderless confidant. 
I realize my pioneering work in camouflaged,
hide-in-plain-sight isolationism
is today’s normal.
And all the other seats appear empty.

These new virtual hermits  
live in their in their cars and cubicles,
behind desks and counters,
and under the covers in thrall of TVs,
computers and smartphones. 
They hide behind avatars, masks and
sullen defenses so the real them
is kept undiscovered –-
a secret for their eyes only. 
If they even open them.

Now on my downhill glide, I’ve started to knock
some of those defenses down – my own and others.
Even if I never make that ultimate connection,
warm form to warm form,
I think the ride will be pretty splendid
in its own right, the bandwidth wind in my hair.
Of course, my greatest fear in this quest
is that I really am alone in this world
of click-to-connect friendships. 
Or worse, I’m just naïve enough
to think I'm not.