#the hypertexts

My face is getting craggier. My pants are getting saggier. My ear-hair’s getting shaggier. My wife is getting naggier. I’m getting old! My memory’s plumb awful. My eyesight is unlawful. I eschew a tofu waffle. My wife’s an Eiffel eyeful. I’m getting old! My temperature is colder. My molars need more solder. Soon I’ll need a boulder-holder. My wife seized up. Unfold her! I’m getting…

We were planted to stand, not to sprawl in this way   by the larger of lakes in the park, to stare straight at the sky through the night and the day,   not to ogle our own shades of bark. But the lake has swelled swampily over the years,   seizing soil in her cool clammy clench, with a treasure of twigs-and-grass, sweet chestnut spheres,   and a hoard of hard wood, once a bench. How we cling to…

I. Many a sun and many a moon I walked the earth and whistled a tune. I did not whistle as I worked: the whistle was my work. I shirked nothing I saw and made a rhyme to children at play and hard time. II. Among the prisoners I saw the leaden manacles of Law, the heavy ball and chain, the quirt. And yet I whistled at my work. III. Among the children’s daisy faces and in the women’s frowsy…

What is she doing, the mad old bat, Down on her knees in the garden? In her busted boots and her happiness hat She doesn’t know and she wouldn’t care That the size of the arse sticking up in the air Is shading so much of the garden. She pulls out a weed, the mad old bat, Out of the face of the garden. She tuts at the trauma and fusses it flat While the waste-not weed she will put to use By…

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Michael R. Burch, ‘Styx’

Black waters,deep and dark and still…all men have passed this way,or will. ***** Michael R. Burch writes: “This original epigram, written in my teens, returns more than 6,000 results. I started writing poetry around age 13 and decided that I wanted to challenge the immortals around age 15. I was always very ambitious about my writing. When I couldn’t out-write Keats and Shelley at age 15, I…