from BOLT UPRIGHT

Three Poems by V.B. Price

in memoriam: the bittersweet and pure love without irony, for both

SOMETIMES NOTHING HAPPENS
when it should. Leaves don’t fall.
Cranes are late. The cat chases
the wily sparrow up a tree
and tries to fly after it.
Snow comes down as gruel.
Sometimes it’s all spot on.
The truck plows into the car
it couldn’t miss.
The bird drops its load with an apple seed
in the back corner of your garden.
The wiser one in your life
hears you wrong and thinks
you’ve caught on at last.
Timing is everything, we’re told,
usually by someone who’s
beaten us to the punch.

THE WORLD IS
as it is:
famine, murder,
peaceful nights,
torture, plague,
exquisite love;
and we
are as we are,
burning ants,
whole landscapes,
whole generations
if we could,
with magnifying glass
of sentience, caught not
in demon glee,
but in how
we are made,
consciousness always
conscious
of something, which is
always us.
We can do little about
the roiling of joy with catastrophe,
as helpless in the world of tsunamis
and normal horrors
as we are in the world
of our bodies, except
we can heal them
often
by a simple change
of the lens of belief.
We are always free to practice
the states of mind we believe to be good,
that is
as we are,
free to aspire, not minding,
maybe yes, maybe no,
but the yes—that’s worth
all the difference.

THE BRILLIANT NIBBLING
of piranha-like minds
doing what they think,
just skimming,
taking the sole morsel
from the starving girl’s plate
and nodding kindly that yes
her hunger is what she gets.
There they go,
the pious grabbers,
rough-riding
through the eyes
of needles
on camels greased
with porno
compassion,
swarming on
heaven, their jaws
nipping while paws
of the cosmos
morally squash
their insatiable self-
righteous choice
of themselves,
relentlessly made
inconsequential,
no matter how
long it takes,
in the end.

(Image by fdecomite)