Poems
Original Poetry by Warren GastonSwiss Cheese
The distinctive thing about Swiss cheese, the gorgeous holes, the gas fermenting bubbles leaving hollows, shaped emptiness. Some lacy. Some perfect spheres. Some amoeba-like, amorphous. Swiss cheese, notable for what is not there. Yet we buy it not for nothing but...
Stiff
I’ve never liked meringue. Always have. The way it stiffens being whipped, lingers on the lip like a fish hook, exotically sweet like India in 1930’s romantic movies, the sari draped girl wearing dark eyes, and her young lover, a raj or something, wearing a jeweled...
Monuments, Paris, 2016
Out the window of a bus, a small human drama, a man and his mother sit at a sidewalk café. His eyes are smeared with tears and smoke. She crushes out her cigarette and gestures for him to move closer. He scoots his chair to hers, drapes his arms around her scarf...
Love on Mars
There are not that many unlike things scattered about the universe and one of them is iron, scooped up by the Rover, in the crust of Mars. Who would have expected to discover this common earth thing there, in that distant world which I assumed would be much stranger...
Text to the Western World from Homer
War over. Troy fell thx to Odysseus now trying to make it back home. Don’t wait up. Just wait 2800 years. The story will repeat again in Leo Bloom, June 16, 1904, as he walked a day Dublin. ______________________________________________ I have been reading a book...
Odysseus and the Oar
After ten years at war, another ten at sea, Odysseus, now with another king’s sailors on another king’s swift slender ship, wind taut sails, salt slick gleaming oars, the great trickster of horse-building fame, deceiver of armies, monsters, and men, was on his way...
Poor Ghost
Poor ghost, dead as trousers hung to dry, filled not with flesh but breezes, wearing a see-through body made of disappointed breath, naked to your rattling bones, sillier than sad. All you can do is annoy us in the night and amuse us some by day. You were murdered...
Denying the Holocaust
International Holocaust Remembrance Day 1/27/2019 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...
Nearby Foreign Places
There are several places on this earth I’ve never been. Several? Hell! Let me be honest. Thousands. Thousands. Many thousands of places on the earth I’ve never been. Most. And where I am right now is one of them. Obviously, I am where I am, but barely. Not much to...