The Deck

Showering Lilac flakes
whiten my hair,
the sweet narcotic air
shifts my head talk,
as I hammer nails
ripping out and replacing boards.
Below the flowering, abundant
brilliance, fading to white,
spring snow
covers the black rot
I dig into.

Kent Bowker
5/26/2012

On Selling ‘Seminole’

I panic, I’ve lowered the price.
My boat may  sell before I sail again,
and my long reaches into the glittering sea,
moments of enchantment   will be memory.
Inevitably, like a failing sea breeze,
movements in an aging life diminish.

Birds on the ocean are different
than those around my  safe quiet cottage,
their  cries, never echoed by obstruction
fade into the forever receding horizon,
the infinite future I now see cut.

Kent Bowker       5/12/2012

OILY

Oil from Pandora’s box
smothers our mother world,
and pop goes the Beezeal
Bub, you’ve got problems:
because —

frothy fickle freeways
push California outbound into
a grass land of otters chomping
into illusory hippies, swimming into sunsets,
encapsulating bunnies sniffing glue.
Moldy hibiscus blossoms waft no scents
of pernicious nonsense
into the empty mind of a poet.

Who’s to know it all, silly,
stuff that bounds around
the corner drugstore as candy
is dandier than pots of flowers
in the grand lexicon
of an exhausted breath.

Kent Bowker
4/1/2012

Now!

There was a time  the earth was open
limitless, all could be taken that could–
but not now, the old injunctions fail,
our trained neurons scream in pain–
not further, not further!

Our inflated  expansion is over,
turns taking into catastrophes,
turbulent inward contests for space,
primacy tearing apart amenities,
for each one feels the same pain
all driven by the ancient command
‘go forth, be fruitful, and multiply’.

The Buddha and Yahweh contend
for the soul, minds in flames,
inner fires of ruptured belief
face realities —
our free space is no more
no more riches to wrest from the earth
not enough water for all to drink
that I should thirst, for all my days to come.

Kent Bowker    4/12/12