Appreciation (A Pushkin Sonnet)

Posted on February 5, 2023 by sputterpub

Existence seems a precious state of being –
a rare and lucky possibility,
with creatures capable of somehow seeing,
to finite age before mortality.
I wasn’t born an ant (and that’s appealing) –
I’m able to sense consciousness and feeling.
I wasn’t doomed to be a pet or food
(I’m human and can diagnose a mood).

And human-born, of people, I’ve the blessing
of never lacking sustenance or roof,
and seldom suffering unfair reproof.
I’m female and a Jew, but I’m not stressing
from racist acts or bully words. To date,
it’s like I’m charmed. And I appreciate.

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1991

Posted on February 4, 2023 by sputterpub

A 2 raised to the power 5 results
in tallied years since they had their affair.
For 10 days then, two middle-aged adults
conversed, exposed, laid every detail bare.
Outgoing both, they’d neither had a share
in any love so easy to convey.
And though since then they haven’t coupled, they’re
still treasuring those memories today.

(Huitain)

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Other People’s Problems

Posted on February 3, 2023 by sputterpub

I bought the cottage 15 years ago.
Its genesis in 1944
was guest room in the yard, where it won’t show,
behind a single-family shingled house.
A college town, the place would undergo
progression into flats to rent, then buy.
An H.O.A. of 5 at last, I know
I’m lucky to have separate walls and door.
The front house often fails. It’s not my woe.

(Magic 9)

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Brain Draft

Posted on February 2, 2023 by sputterpub

Accused of thinking she knows everything,
she’s smart enough to know that isn’t so.
With every step of knowledge furthering,
she glimpses how much farther she could go.
And when she tries suppressing signs she’s bright,
she fails to pull the bushel really tight.
The lumens leak. Her fellows see the beam,
and claim she values brains to an extreme.

Perhaps she does. She’s willing to admit
it to herself and maybe to you, too.
She can’t say that it’s inappropriate
to cherish such. The other point of view
she tried, and boredom drove her fast away.
She wants companions who can think and say.

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Tints & Tones

Posted on February 1, 2023 by sputterpub

He saw the world in color, but his course
was black & white cartoonish absolutes.
His superheroes had explosive force
and all his villains acted thorough brutes.
A man’s a man, and alpha is preferred;
a woman misbehaving is a bitch.
And so it stood until the worst occurred,
and he was stricken from he knew not which.

Then gray were the impressions he received,
and murky were the boundaries he sensed.
His weakness waxed, and though his loved ones grieved,
the women in his life, with will condensed,
stepped up to lead, to flex, exerting vim,
confounding all those certainties in him.

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I Don’t Agree

Posted on January 31, 2023 by sputterpub

I don’t agree with classic gender roles.
They always seemed irrelevant to me.
A human first, ignoring separate goals,
I don’t agree.

Of course I understand biology,
but skeletons and muscles aren’t souls,
and consciousness connotes some liberty.

Simplistic attitudes are full of holes,
and fundament is shit’s nativity.
Oblivious to idiot controls,
I don’t agree.

(Roundel)

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Morning Fast

Posted on January 30, 2023 by sputterpub

It’s usually not hard to wait till noon
to break my fast. I never had a yen
for food on waking – I would just as soon
let most the morning pass without. Back when
I was a kid with parents who’d cocoon
me if I let them, over and again
insisting breakfast is the vital meal?
My stomach always argued – no big deal.

(Ottava Rima)

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Toward Castro

Posted on January 29, 2023 by sputterpub

Succeeding weeks of rain, the air’s so clean
it slaps my cheeks and soothing coats my throat.
I’m walking to the Metro, and the scene
is gentle as a promenade. I float
on foot through color, like an antidote
to mudslides, teeming gutters, trees that could
no longer clutch the liquid earth. I note
no threat or peril in this neighborhood.

(Huitain)

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The Call Back

Posted on January 28, 2023 by sputterpub

The nightly call I never want to make
that she would miss, although we little speak –
a check-in of some kind that doesn’t take
much time but happens 7 days a week –
last night produced a circumstance unique
enough to mention here. She called me back
and thanked me for advice, with no critique,
toward love, and veering out of habit’s track.

(Huitain)

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Peeve (Subjective I)

Posted on January 27, 2023 by sputterpub

The older I become, the more I hate
behavior impolite or words that try
to rile. I have learned to modulate
the older I.

I never went for any sort of lie.
There’s murk and chaos in dishonest state.
Exaggeration makes me question why.

But what I truly seek to abnegate
is ordinary rudeness. Till I die
I’ll try to gentle-speak and soft-create
the older I.

(Roundel)

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