Man Versus Machine

By Joseph Hesch

Every morning I enter this workday machine
and it enters me with the scent of
burning electric motors,
like hundreds of toy locomotives.
They carry me up the escalator to
my seat on this train
to nowhere fast.
Where every sight, smell,
feeling of my butt in this chair,
my fingers on the keyboard,
my head to my desk,
is the same as yesterday’s
and will be again tomorrow.
And could be all the other tomorrows.
Can't I change tomorrow?
Maybe I’ll hold my nose and
walk close-eyed up the down escalator,
bumping into and disturbing
their order of things.
Or maybe I should just roll over,
when the alarm rings,
and open my senses to change --
the sight of her breathing,
the scent of her sleeping,
the feel of my skin on hers,
my fingers in her hair,
my head to her pillow --
maybe for what will seem the first time;
maybe forever.

Life, Or So I Hear

By Joseph Hesch

Since the doc unlocked my ears
from decades of solitary confinement,
I've emerged into a world
I forgot existed and
hadn't fully lived in.
Just over the trees,
I discover the distant rolling
of the highway. It's my roiling surf,
shushed now and then by the windblown
prickly pines guarding
this museum of natural history.
The 18-wheel waves crash on and on,
and quieting them must be like
pacifying the Atlantic.
Now I hear the crows,
black commas punctuating fields
and their cawing dialogue
with the songbirds' trills.
A herd of boys hollering a game of soccer
edits those exchanges, deleting
the avian speech and replacing it with
ill-fitting, awkward profanity.
All I've missed because of my deafness
overwhelms me now, like I'm one
of those trapped miners
reborn into the harsh brightness of day.
I wonder if all this time I spent
in the muffling shadows
made me invisible to you and the world
because I couldn't hear it and
couldn't understand you.

Certain, We Believe the Uncertain

By Joseph Hesch

Feed a cold. Starve a fever.

Drown a depression. Smother a lover.

Wax a memory. Shave a lie.

Gild a lily. Strip a tease.

Seize a day. Let go your feelings.

Catch a cold.

Deja your vu.

We've seen it all before

and closed our eyes

to those truths. 

But, beneath our lids, 

we best judge always

the what's what

and who's who

with our hearts,

in darkness kept.

Certain, we believe the uncertain

smoke-limned sensation

and not the mirrored lights

of self in others’ lying eyes.

Oasis

By Joseph Hesch
Inspired by Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks"

I was sitting there

on the dark end,

away from the windows'

reflections on lives ill-spent,

bookended by open stools,

as well as the day before today

and the night after tomorrow.

Squinting into the icecube

at the bottom of my glass

I see familiar movement behind me,

or maybe it's there in front of me,

all these faces I recognize.

Or maybe just one face multiplied

in the melting moment suspended in my

too-swiftly dwindling spirit.

Perhaps it's another illusion,

a mirage in my desert of time.

I really don't see anything out there

in those near or distant tomorrows

that will make me feel better

about my todays.

That's probably because

I've emptied too many

of my yesterdays.

When the Last Snow Came

 By Joseph Hesch

When the last snow came,
it caught all of us off-guard,
especially the mourning doves.
The dappled grey couples
sat side by side, wing to wing,
perched silently, sullenly,
in the maple out back,
its red buds aborting blast-off
for another day.
The whisper of falling flakes
was the only voice we heard.
And out against the white background
of soon-to-disappear spring snow,
stood this paragraph without words,
only quotation marks.

A while back I promised one more Winter poem. Yesterday I noticed the maple trees decided to develop their version of adolescent acne on the tips of their branches, so I figured it was time. I wrote this poem a couple of years ago, after once again hanging out in the backyard with Mollie. A soft slop of snow began to fall and every living thing outside tucked their heads between their shoulders and sighed. Including the doves. I sat down that afternoon and recorded my observations and titled it, "___" -- graphically representing two pair of mourning doves on a branch.  Once again, I was being too cryptic by any editor's imaginings.  After changing the title, the poem was published in Wanderings Magazine.

La Luna Piena

By Joseph Hesch

Last night’s full moon,
resplendent in its frost-haloed glory,
shone like the brightest pearl,
perched on a phosphorescent-ringed
half-shell, like Botticelli’s Venus.
Or maybe like a silver stone
dropped into the
deepest-blue pool, and there
emitting concentric ripples
of gold, turquoise, and pink,
and a light beyond white,
casting shadows so dense
I tripped over one.

This is another poem I submitted to my friend, poet Heather Grace Stewart for the Poets for Tsunami Relief one-week blogzine of poetry on her website Where the Butterflies Go. It's been in the notebook for a while and was inspired by standing out in the yard one clear night with my longtime muse, our Golden Retriever Mollie. Please check out Heather's website and maybe be illuminated by some wonderful poets.

A Rising Sunset

By Joseph Hesch

In a land named for a growing celestial light,
It was earth itself that heaved upon it
the sudden shaking darkness.
The wasted land awakened a frightened ocean
that ran crying to its mother,
pushing people further out of reach
of their rising sun, never to see the light again.
Always the darkness can become darker,
and though fear shortens arms,
we must never fear to embrace
even the dusk when we may.


I wrote this poem for my friend, poet Heather Grace Stewart's Poets for Tsunami Relief one-week blogzine of poetry on her website Where the Butterflies Go. She's posting as many poems by her many poet pals from around the world as she can this week on many different themes. Her plan is to offer the reading audience a variety of excellent poetry in hopes that readers will open their minds and hearts to the poems, and to the cause of donating to the relief of people caught in the aftermath of the horrible earthquake and resultant tsunami in Japan. Please check out her website and embrace some light.