William Blackburn

Sans inspiration I dictate ad nauseam admonitions to myself

Huddled in deep thought brooding after dark

Wandering where the page might take me

Down half-baked corridors in mirrors reflecting inward

Backward, like an Escher lithograph

Morph now the moments into minuets syncopated out of step

Out of fashion with the times

I have lived now long enough to seem irrelevant

Close to out of my depth yet still stuck in it with relish

 

Only now I understand why mother feared the new technology of the music CD

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Despair not taken as a pithy path not pathos but rather pining

For homemade ice-cream from the pail hand cranked near forty years ago

Summer nights and strange delight at the soft murmur of gasoline engines

Grass being mowed as the Jones's keep up

Suburbia of late last century trap to make you think

You could recapture the essence of the Edwardians

Somehow, someday, somewhere little lords of clapboard castles

Kept parlor maids with gold bands and washing machines

Before the need for second incomes

 

It shook the world, tore it down, the second coming of world war women working downtown

 

Crabapple tree: front yard above the walkway and rarely climbed being too low

Back hill fortress to be defended in simpler times

Caterwaul of neighborhood hoodlums playing tag from yard to yard

Where leaves from last fall lay about, sunning and wrinkling

Before whisking away on the breeze, a sneeze of west wind bringing pollen

Cooling rain shower clogs the drain with hairballs just when a warm shower would reward

After the long day toiling then riding the crowded bus to the empty station

At the end of the line daily as the days seem to blend into one long stretch:

A lifetime as a lifeline to dependents and helpmates

 

The middle-class trap of what’s the latest thing, your appetite for delight to sate