Venn Diagram

Imagine an immense circle of all the poems ever written,

intersected with a smaller circle of people

inclined to read poetry,

the points that would represent my writing

would be too small to be rendered at this scale.

But there would still be points of mine

in that lens shape between circle A and circle B.

And then there would be an immense amount of pointless space.

Putting it another way,

imagine I were a market gardener.

There would be an immense amount of compost,

the unread words tossed on a heap.

But in raising poems,

the cost of seed and soil is remarkably low,

and the time, well, time is another of those things

you can’t take with you.

Many might find it odd that I would write so many words,

the market for the kind I write being what it is,

yet I find curious satisfaction

in composing thoughts

that will be left to decompose.

You are looking at the harvest.

And now I imagine your wry grin,

your non-existent self,

in an infinite universe in which I turn out to be mistaken,

not no one not reading these very words.

This is how we all live, after all.

I, your pointless unpublished poet,

imagined that it was so,

the Venn diagram and all

and that we are

what we are,

and who,

and why

not that any of it would stop me from thinking what follows,

after all,

and I smiled my own wry grin,

as I left a sack of zucchini on your doorstep

and I walked away.

Who but a writer uses words

like doorstep,

anyway?

Remarking on faces on Mass Street

This has been said before

but I frequently see remarkable faces.

Yet I feel it bears repeating.

Two such faces just walked by the bench where I sit.

I’m afraid I don’t have the ability to do justice to all these faces.

Earlier, there was this astonishingly beautiful face of a young woman,

the wind cunningly blowing wisps of her straight dark hair

across her face as she tried to talk on her phone.

But her’s is not the face I would have you focus on –

it will be easily noticed without my help.

There was an older man sitting on a bench farther down the street,

a soft smile, the sun on his pale scalp, only wisps remaining…

But oh, there are so many other remarkable faces, but never mind.

There’s no use my writing yet more words that will likely be overlooked.

See these remarkable faces for yourself, if you will.

This round-face boy with a sippy cup just stumbled by

in the company of two more remarkable faces.

I probably only have this one chance to see them. 

Hot Pepper Boy

I happened upon a young man in South Park.

I suspect the girls his age would say he was a beautiful boy, hoping to run their hands through his dark, thick, wavy hair, wanting to touch the corners of his sweet mouth with their fingers.

He was bent over purple-leaved plants, his young, shirtless back to the sun, blue jeans low on his slender hips, harvesting the cherry-sized, the cherry red, fruit of what I saw as ornamental pepper plants.

I hear they’re really hot, I said.

Without a word, he look over at me, and then, with the slightest of smiles, he reached into his pouch, not far from a full gallon of the shiny, round, reddest of red peppers.

The boy held one out to me, speaking only with his eyes.

I heard that they’re really hot, really, repeating only what little I knew.

He smiled at me. Or perhaps he looked at me only with the amusement he felt, and he turned and bent back to his task.

Good luck with those peppers, I said, as I turned and walked on.

Two scary guys

A ragged panhandler sits, clothes dirty and torn, a poorly lettered cardboard sign on the sidewalk. You cross to the other side of the street, just to be safe.

Then there approaches a man in a suit and a scowl on his face, mixed with fear, as if he has a bomb strapped to his heart, the button under his own thumb, and you cross back to the other side.

Who are you afraid of?

            And now with line breaks:

A ragged panhandler sits,

clothes dirty and torn,

with a poorly lettered cardboard sign,

on the sidewalk.

You cross to the other side of the street,

just to be safe.

Then there approaches a man in a suit

and a scowl on his face,

mixed with a little fear,

as if he has a bomb strapped to his heart,

the button under his own thumb,

and you cross back to the other side.

Who are you afraid of?