Poems
Original Poetry by Warren GastonMaterial Teachers
I will matriculate in a school of material teachers that I might know the polysaccharide love of a tree, or the solid mineral experience of iron. If I could rest in the presence of a rock that has done nothing in a thousand years but sit in utter satisfaction on the...
Hard Questions
As I lay dying, it will not be God’s voice I hear but my own voice asking questions. God will be listening, curious to know if I will ask myself hard questions. More curious still, both of us will wonder what hard questions I will ask God. ...
An Old Couple Goes in for Counseling
And I, sitting in my car in the parking lot, wonder what went wrong. The heavy history of their years finally catching up? Looking at the unoccupied blue Ford Escape next to me, I imagine them now on a love seat in a counselor’s office, a short length of opposition ...
Denying the Holocaust
I would like to believe the Holocaust never happened and except for the overwhelming weight of evidence, I could. I would like to believe the Holocaust never happened, that Stille Nacht was not sung beneath the chimneys of Auschwitz, that the beech trees of Buchenwald...
Whose Mouth?
Eating at the Cederholm Roadside Café I wonder whose mouth this fork last visited, whose coffee this spoon has recently stirred. Beyond whose teeth did this fork unburden its salad cargo of vegetal nutrition, on whose tongue did it rest for the pleasure of taste...
A Simple Poem
I am writing a poem trying not to be clever. Can I do it, maybe not, but never say never. I will be parsimonious with multi-syllabic words like nevertheless and whatsoever. Also I will not use short single syllable words like shit or turds, not because they are long...
Learning in Old Age
The hardest part of learning is the unlearning. It takes years for the mind to loosen its grip on sweet poisons, the accumulation of stagnant information and stultified facts, the rubble of theories and concepts, sediment in the brain, a sleepwalker stuck in freshly...
A New Take on Old
I will never grow old. No. I will never grow old. I will age, yes, of course, accumulating minutes like molecules stored in the matter of my body until now I am fat with time. It’s too late for me to grow old. I was born old, a corporeal lump of galactic matter,, an ...
I Have the Money
The girl in the fast-food drive-up window doesn’t know me, has no obligation to feed me, doesn’t care if I am hungry, doesn’t give a damn about the small earthquake in my stomach as my hands grip the steering wheel and I point my car toward the largess of her...