POEM FOR MY FATHER

On weekends my father worked
For Luke Morley at the
Corner grocery store
Not for money but for conversation
He never had with my mother
Stacking shelves with canned goods
Coming home with his reward
A pack or two of cigarettes
Sitting alone staring out the window
Blowing smoke rings across the room
The ashes falling in the ashtray
Like bits and pieces of his life

APPROACHING SEVENTY

The words come harder
Set their own pace
Sometimes the rabbit
Sometimes the hare
Always stripped bare
Bukowski told me in a letter
You seem like a man who knows
Where it’s at
Didn’t then
Don’t now…
Just hanging around with words
That dangle like an outlaw’s neck
Stretched at the end
Of a rope

POEM FOR VJ

You were like a gunslinger of old
Quick on the draw
And I should have known it was over
When you sent me an e-mail saying
"Beware of Scorpio’s they’ll bite
You in the ass every time"
When you’re young a female smile
Can get you hard
When you get older that same smile
Can be like walking the last mile
And you know it’s time to move on
When you begin to feel like the
Words to a bad song
The betrayal not the reason
But the last straw
You of loveless love letters
That lay on the page
Like a corpse on a slab
At the morgue

GOLDEN YEARS

It’s been in the 30’s two nights in a row
And I’m sitting here freezing my butt off
Waiting for the power company to come
And fix the problem
But it isn’t so bad when you stop to consider
9/11 the war in Iraq and that Hemingway
Took a shotgun between his legs
And blew his brains out
Which has nothing and everything
To do with this poem
Thirty degree nights won’t kill you
But they don’t bring comfort either
The trouble with being single
The trouble with being sixty-nine
Is knowing you could die alone
And go undiscovered for weeks
With nothing but rotting flesh
To tell your story and a few poems
To remember you by

© A.D. Winans 2006
 

 

 

A. D. Winans is a native San Francisco poet, writer and photographer. A member of PEN. A graduate of San Francisco State University. Former editor and publisher of Second Coming. Work has been widely published. Visit his homepage here: www.adwinans.mysite.com