Joseph's Bedtime Dilemma

Here's a brief something I just found that I wrote back in high school. I don't know, I rather like it.

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Somehow, the pistol pressed against his left temple reminded Joseph of a case he had six years ago in which a robber was judged innocent because of his victim’s unreliability, which was due to crimes of the victim’s own. Joseph had represented the robbed man, and had lost enough money on the case to stall his plan for installing a security system in his house. During the case, evidence was uncovered that showed that the robbed man had embezzled company funds and cheated on his wife. He was the sole witness, and the jury didn’t trust his testimony. The robber was acquitted, and after another trial Joseph’s client spent the next three hundred and sixty-five days folding towels.

After this unpleasant reminder, Joseph felt angry. Glass and mud combined and conspired to spoil his newly mopped hardwood floor, and the splintered, empty window frame would let in a draft all night. The door wasn’t locked. They could have just used that. Now he would have to cover it up with a tarp or sheet or duct tape or saran wrap or the bones of his attackers or a combination of all of these, or else the geese might get in and spread their turds all over his newly mopped hardwood floor. The nerve of these people.

The next thing Joseph noticed was the smell. Either the jumpy, masked criminal who held death to Joseph’s head with one arm and cut off the oxygen flow to his brain with the other was scared into perspiring rivers of smelly sweat, or else his black clothes were as warm as they looked. Either way, Joseph was reminded of the three cans of Right Guard in his dresser.

While Joseph pondered these things, the smelly man’s partner in crime carelessly caroused throughout the house, looking for something worth risking at least a year behind prison bars for. Joseph thought it strange that the first place he looked after making a general sweep of the place was the refrigerator. Maybe he knew something Joseph didn’t. Maybe some more knowledgeable and wealthy people kept their valuables in the fridge. He, however, had no such desire to preserve the freshness of his Rolexes, and he was glad he wasn’t being asked to represent them in court. These goons were ready-made open-and-shut -- if he could only get that gun pointed away from his brain.

Sonnet I

Above a grove where silly sparrows sing,
In the hills below that Mount Parnassus,
To which doom'd lambs and kids the priests do bring,
Stands of walnut trees are clumped in masses.
There I, the sole eternal Phoenix perch,
Bending low the branch beneath my fiery bulk.
Thousand deaths have I; thousand lives to search
Nightly skies for sun, that bright and blinding hulk,
Daily rising o'er Delphi before me,
Fiercely greeting my hard and calloused eyes,
To slake my thirst for some divinity --
All day long I watch it fall to rise.
        And if seven suns were there I'd watch them too
        But when you wake -- I cannot look at you.

Gone to Babylon

Another stab at poetry. This poem is simplistic and one-sided, and I like it that way. Patriotic poetry in wartime is no place for nuance.


Our boys have gone to Babylon
While we sit and watch TV.
Our boys have gone to Babylon
To save the world from tyranny.

To the Tigris they bring hope again,
While we lament the price of gas.
To the Tigris they bring hope again.
"How much longer will this last?"

Those men and women bold and brave,
These powdered politicians.
Those men and women bold and brave --
Who has the higher mission?

From hunting hooded murderers
With evil in their bones,
From hunting hooded murderers
We would seek to call them home?

Cadavers stuffed with dynamite,
Dumped in a busy street.
Cadavers stuffed with dynamite,
And we should lead the first retreat?

The Times slanders the President,
And CBS reports the toll.
The Times slanders the President --
Can we guess who shares their goal?

Our boys have gone to Babylon,
While the world frets and frowns.
Our boys have gone to Babylon,

That God may bless the trodden down,
The Horn of Plenty might be found,
And one day peace proclaimed all round.

What Descartes Knows

Here is a timid stab at poetry:

In air-conditioned fluorescence dim,
with hums of loud comfort I felt too full
of comfortless declarations grim.

Plato's cave was a pageant pure
next to the dim flickering shades
the prof projected, giving the tour

of dead men's ideas, embalmed in text--
until later animated
in clean ivory catacomb's next.

Cogito ergo sum, he said,
before he ceased his lofty summing.
He strains theories with this fact: he is dead.

What then is real? We'll never know.
For that only sure thing rots beneath
an old Paris church, just below

a modern replica, hewed from stone,
of an ancient wooden tool of dread,
lost since that day it served as a throne
and our sole certainty from Calvary shone.