By: Channie Greenberg

Daffodil

Cream or gold vanity, expressed during fleeting weeks of wet and sun,
You couldn’t work past life’s expectations when your ephemeral nature
Limited your seasons. Hence, higgledy-piggledy, you grew on hillsides,
In meadows, in middens’ depths, alongside highways, under windows.

As a girl, I contemplated tenuous things like butterfly wings, rain clouds,
Elementary school friendships. Mathematics, music, spelling carried no
Solace, no sleepover invitations, no trading bright hair ribbons. Mostly,
I gathered fragile memories alongside other “less preferred” classmates.

Springtime, though, no matter my social status, my grades, my scraped
Knees, produced your lovely golden pedals, your tongue-like stamens
Stuck out from mouths. You saw I dreaded assigned seats, flag pledges,
Roll call, eraser clapping, watching happy kids scurry in the playground.

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“Unloved’s” Forever “Misery”

No matter the manner of relational initialization,
It remains the case that lovers must be private eyes.

After all, synesis among paired persons fails repeatedly
When misunderstanding blooms like wild mushrooms.

Whether or not written words are other than art makes no
Difference to creators that snuff sentiments unwisely.

Consider; our souls’ jalousie windows frequently fail
To shutter against ill-expressed vituperative endeavors.

More often, our experiential referents, those found in
Interlocking scripts, go AWOL, escape fill-in realities.

###

Interrobang

Punctuation’s placement among dotards’ communications, purls,
Runs thru entire composing, publishing, marketing processes, spits
At undeveloped verbal architects wary of social whistles, strobes,
Manages to apply forms of no holds barred rhetoric, continues to
Shake up texts amidst the aftereffects of social media undertakings
(just as practice brings improvement, convergence sells pricy titles.)

Along with profuse content antediluvian creators once offered, clickbait
Excerpts raise hopes, defeat probabilities, fail to pay owed royalty fees.
To boot, when jongleurs make rent by offering up melancholy, foreign
Songs, amidst patriotic displays of seasons, to assorted art benefactors,
Music, words, images serve as milgrains for real or imagined goings-on,
Get handled by “experts’” whose cons repeatedly trump common sense.

Consider that no matter one’s prior familiarity with relationship woes,
Problems with worship, mostly underscore ways in which senectitude
Grips rich, poor, handsome, hideous, cancer victims, buskers unwilling
To yield sidewalk jurisdictions, gain alternative skills from decade-long
Efforts spent distinguishing ballads from anime, blues, competing versus
Distributed alms, prostitutes, game shows, also sundry sorts of aspiration.

Reluctant onlookers, plus most originators stuck on sui generis topics,
Seek the wisdom of years to acquire straightforward terms for sequela.
Melodies define, delineate, encourage, similarly deter human measures,
No matter the number of hitherto restored valuables, absent memories,
Original investigations, artificial emulations, mosquitos finger-crushed.
Modifying entire populations’ slant on happenstances grows demanding.

“Prehistoric” persons, singularly, inflate innately sucked on wherewithal
Such that, more than ornamentation, people slinging workday dejection,
Perhaps, monthly, willingly warble cockroach jingles, eat whole pizzas.
Every newly acquired antique requires sanding, each broken lark needs
Rotations about nose to tail axes, above and beyond veterinary upkeep.
In any case, free countries’ bulky political feints seem so matter-of-fact.