By: Richard LeDue

The Dream

It’s hard to accept all the love songs
were written about people
who have nothing to do with me,
especially as my grey hair colours in
the loneliness one calls retirement

The TV set to just loud enough
to prove to myself I can still hear
all the laugh tracks canning dead actors
like some sort of televised hell
I’m too in love with to turn off

The phone quiet as someone mourning
a distant relative they never phoned
only for me to wake up and realize
it’s just another Wednesday
and I’m late for work

Snow on Another Calm Day

For Al and Eurithe Purdy

A dead poet’s out of print collection
about communist Russia
was supposed to inspire me
to write my own poems
damning the gods of capitalism for arguing
that Marxist atheism doesn’t exist,
but instead reminded me
how much our time is given away
to feed wrinkles and greying hair,
while the black and white photos Purdy’s wife took
are quiet as snow on another calm day,
when the steam from a hot cup of coffee
writes its own book
without any care of politics
or being discarded from a library in Toronto
I never heard of
for a future that doesn’t need any of us
to exist

A Good Reason to Climb Mount Everest Instead Of Writing Poems

Shakespeare sonnets haunting high schools
those dead words alive just enough
to seem more like enthusiasm
of some teacher (who writes poetry secretly)
than a ghost counting to fourteen

The rhyme scheme trying its hardest
to be more than another pyramid scheme
where aspiring writers write
hoping one day to be the inspiration
for more aspiring writers

Iambic pentameter footsteps on a page
following and leading at the same time
even if bored students are unmoved
and the artist’s afterlife a crooked photocopy
reincarnated as a paper airplane