By: Richard LeDue

Canned Corn Left on the Store Shelf

I am a genius according to a website
because I had some of the characteristics
it listed, like messy handwriting,
even though I’ve never eaten a burger
with the president, and instead write
poems like this one,
which inspire paper airplanes
instead of a mission to Mars
and remind me how I always forget
something on my grocery list.

Gizzarded

A shelf buckling with dusty books
reminds me of my own brain
heavy with all the forgotten facts
I memorized in my youth,
only to pass tests
that don’t matter now.

Knowledge helping me
feel down, especially on those days
when staring out the window
an exam into my soul,
where the barren road doesn’t care
if I read Yeats or could label
the digestive track of an earthworm,
but lets my footprints that never were
lecture me about being
trapped by falling in love
with six figures and reasonable rent.

Collapse inevitable as turning a page
in a novel someone else suggested
because they thought they knew you
would enjoy it,
yet I’ve always been too agreeable
in those situations,
taking the book home
so my burden could mature.

Pure Loneliness

Nights filled with black and white dreams,
only to be forgotten behind curtains
keeping a sunrise from being
the sort of inspiration that helps you
ignore how a bed just practice for a casket,
and even if you can’t remember what makes it
different from a coffin,
your shadow always waits for you
to make it dance.

Mozart’s unfinished requiem more music
you’ve never heard,
leaving silence to reminiscence
about all your unsaid words
to those who needed them more than you know,
but at least as your eyes open,
you feel the purest isolation that can exist
from light ruining the darkness you built
like a church that’s supposed to save everyone
except yourself.