‘Rather Warm’ and other poems

By: David Sapp

Rather Warm

Rather warm
I’m certain
You’d agree
We’ve fiddled around
For far too long
Now everyone
Watches Rome
Everything everywhere
Burning brightly
Needlessly thoroughly
And you and I
We are all Nero
Mindlessly plucking
Strumming humming
Catchy tunes
In our comfy air
Conditioned apocalypse

There’s Brutality

There’s brutality
On the front page
Above the fold
Two photos from
A remote pummeled
Corner of our county
A grim atrophied town
Fire station carryout
Sad moldering trailers
Rusting battered cars

Amanda a sweet
Smiling young woman
Head tilted just so and
Choked with dead
Weeds limbs briars
The bleak shack where
She lived beaten
By her boyfriend

Reports of an overdose
And bruises and bruises
Missing six years now
One source speculates
Amanda was murdered
Buried somewhere stuffed
In a blue plastic barrel
“May never be found”
There’s brutality
Where’s tenderness?

Relentless Repetition

Sons of Abraham
Again again
A requisite revenge

Relentless repetition
Boys sling stones
Bullets as men

Tanks roll again
Rockets’ red glare
Bombs bursting in air
All we comprehend

Misplaced righteousness
Insignificant differences
Again the sin
In brittle scriptures

Daughters of Judea
Your children again
Stirred dust and blood

Crushed again another
Crater – ground between
Ancient mortar and pestle

Surely by now
Isaac Ishmael
You must apprehend
This tragic repetition

Tiny Windows

Down Smokey Road
Deep in the holler
Edge of the woods
A plain white house
At first glance
An ordinary dwelling
But with unusually
Tiny windows
Brandishes strident
Political preferences
From its porch
Flags and signage
Nailed to the siding
Adjacent to and
Noticeably larger than
Its small apertures

You must wonder with
Such narrow openings
It must be impossible
To catch a glimpse
Of heavens spinning
A plump saffron moon
Skirting the horizon
A fox slipping silently
Past barn and silo
Or when it first begins
To snow – you know
That white blurring of
Vision edge to edge
Or taking in the breadth
Of humanity living
Breathing and suffering
Just beyond
Those tiny windows

To Hell with Nirvana

I now comprehend
What it is to suffer
All the particulars
Of misery
Buddha’s friggin’ duhkha
His First (oh so) Noble Truth
(The other three all blather
Superfluous irrelevant)
When day after day
There is nothing but
This unendurable pain
The Eightfold Path
Is an asinine pursuit
When Siddhartha conceived
Nirvana – squeezed it
Out of his loins
A pliable young man
Should have pondered longer
The predicament of the old man
Accordingly – simply put
To hell with nirvana
(The mindless quiet mind
Instead I shall
Listen to the rain

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David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.