Poems
Original Poetry by Warren GastonOld Pants
Old pants, your knees are frayed from repeatedly allowing my body down kneeling to pick up a coin or comfort a child or occasionally pray. You embarrass my wife when I wear you in places where people never grow old and things never wear out. I should take you to the...
Mythic Life
Night! I peer out my study window and see you standing naked in the moonlight, picking an apple from your backyard tree. I undress quickly, scurry down the stairs, and meet you in the small pool of yellow light by your door. You are surprised but glad to see me, and...
Blackbirds
In midlife I was lucky to be swept up by currents of luxurious wind which loosed my mind and freed my body for senseless sensual play - ecstatic dance. a flight of blackbirds wing dance on waves of winter wind flit fly dart dodge glide through the difficult branches...
Literary Difficulties
The poetry written by lions cannot be understood by housecats, nor is there much hope for a fish understanding the verse of a mole, even though they both tunnel, one through water, one through soil. The literary ambitions of the sloth do not measure up to the...
The Stranger
How familiar the stranger. Hear him laugh in the shadow behind your eyes. Aha! He recognizes himself standing tall in your dark. 2015
Picasso’s Weeping Women*
(to be read out loud) took he the face apart he took apart the face to look the face apart he took and shook the face to get an inner look the order of the face forsook the face was now an open book the nose he took the nose he took aside he put the nose to look an...
Quicksand
There are many things not to say. We face each other and suddenly do not say them aloud with a voice of dissatisfied silence. A hole dug in dry sand. Our tongue shovels cannot uncover the words fast enough to make a sound. Sand slips, words fall heaped in our mouths,...
Turning On
In the first hushed moments when the soft electric sizzle begins and the television fades from cold dust gray to brilliant black to luminescent blue, and no image has yet appeared on the screen, I wait like a saint for revelation. I do not recall what channel was...
Prairie Cemetery
Coyotes roam for rabbits. Deer graze beyond the grave protecting fence. A rattlesnake, slithered between bars, warms upon the marker of the self-sufficient dead. The snake, with a shake of its percussive tail, kindly warns of its lethal grin when a widow comes with...