Poems
Original Poetry by Warren GastonDestiny
The check-out girl at the grocery store was named Destiny, according to her tag. And I wondered what her destiny might be. And I wondered if she wondered. Some predestined plan? A trip-tik plotted out with detours and delays for her drive through decades toward the...
A Riff on My Neighborhood
There are no songs in my neighborhood. No curbside singers. No front stoop strummers. No back porch drummers. No rhymes or rhythms rising out of cracks in the sidewalk like lyrical weeds. No guy down the street with bongos serenading the moon or the same guy with...
A Lotus-Eater in Paradise
I do not want to go to Hawaii. Always have not wanted to go. Too dangerous. Too much sunshine. Too many pineapples. Too much sugar cane. Swaying grass hips. Sweetness and light. Too much white silky sand. Too many waves massaging the beach. The urge would be to lie...
Morning Watch
These days I don’t do much. I like not doing much. It gives me something to do. In the early morning I sit and wait. Not waiting, exactly. Not like waiting for Christmas, waiting for the cable guy, or waiting for the 6 o’clock news. More like watching. Like keeping an...
Living Dangerously in an Unsafe World
All the locks and keys, deadbolts, combinations, security cameras, codes, and motion detectors, and yet somehow he broke into his own life without setting off alarms and robbed himself blind. ____________________________________________ Everyone knows this person...
Aphorism #314
What can be said for silence? Not much.
The Existential Moment
Somewhere out there, (you know who you are), we almost hit. To be clear, you almost hit me from behind. You were changing lanes to get a head start at the light, I was slowing toward full stop. One of those 'not quite' existential moments which tightens the grip of...
Another Earthly Pleasure
In a certain year, a late year, this year, I have suddenly become allergic to cherries. I have enjoyed cherries all of my life. Now they are in season, cheap in the grocery store, and I have been wolfing cherries down. There is a process to eating a cherry. Six...
Winner Takes All
There comes a time, inevitably, when decay overpowers repair, systems muddle, some, many, most, rafters lose hold of the roof, foundations are pounded to powder, windows no longer disguise transparency, smoke rises, not through the chimney but from the house on fire....