Why so grateful deadman?
You are dead
Your heart stopped
Your brain oxygenless
You are nothing
Nothing and growing nothinger
Lost through the sieve
But I am not dead and I see you
So you are not gone yet
How grateful you must be
Maybe to me
Or maybe I’m grateful to you
Either way we together are life
Waltzing partners
-T. Weeks
(A response to “Memories”)
The earthquake rumbled into town
Announced only by the thunder of its tectonic track
Echoing across the sleeping valley
Through the sleeping valley
Through never-shaken walls
Through so-called foundations
The buildings sway and respond
They were designed for this
Our fragile etch-a-sketch confidence
Faded after one little shake
-T. Weeks
(A response to “America”)
Mountains impassable
Strung with tinsel roads
Wound minarets
Long-robed goats watch
Humans follow in lines
Up the hill
Down the hill
Always in a line
Sheep and bear wonder
At the single-file people
-T. Weeks
(A response to “The First Dandelion”)
We walk in the day
We fear the dark
When a few roam for food
How precarious the life
Of the walkers in the dark
That sleep in the day
When all the world eats
-T. Weeks
(A response to “The Wallabout Martyrs”)
Tail winds chase my board
I plunge the paddle into glacial depths
Dark cold moving
Every few strokes I remember to look up
To see the peaks
Standing shoulder to shoulder
Pondering the valley with a lake
Studying the slivers of color
Drifting like leaves on the surface
For a minute we study each other
The mountains and I
Until a wobble calls
My attention is back on the water
-T. Weeks
(A response to “Queries to My Seventieth Year”)
Translucent currents
Merge from sallow glaciers
Tiny voices sparkling
Turquoise summer blossoms
Flow one into the other
Ripples into folds
Folds into waves standing
Rearing thunder barreled rhinos
Colliding over buried boulders
Charging the nose of the raft
Blades in hand we mount we rise
We fall we rise again
Rhinos stamping behind us
-T. Weeks
(A response to “My Canary Bird”)
Patient bird hunts
Bullfrog tadpoles scurry into the murk
I hate the heron
Complains the boy on the shore
I love the tadpoles
Replies the man
Without them we’d never see the heron
-T. Weeks
(A response to “As I Sit Writing Here”)
A thousand miles from here
People I have never met
Will never meet
Are playing a game I never play
Never even watch
Half of them will win that game
And I will feel joy
I like the color of their shirts
I had a layover in their airport
They don’t win often
What more reasons need I
-T. Weeks
(A response to “A Font of Type”)
Thinning bullet shower
Colder
Pivot
More shots
Hotter
This must be the way
-T. Weeks
(A response to “The Bravest Soldiers”)
What happened to William Morgan
Betrayer of America supporter of Castro
Seeker of love
Seeker of acceptance
Seeker of a new life
A man seeks seeking liberty
Ambushed by a despot
J. Edgar Hoover sucks the life out of him
Revoking citizenship
Delivering banishment
Vibrato is the word of the day
And these Cuban people are democratic
They would never be communists
A man trying to live in Cuban peace
He doesn’t see that Fidel is just like the rest of them
Power hungry and chasing the power
Chairing the power
Everybody loves the picture of Che Guevara
The idealistic revolutionary
Nobody remembers he ran the national bank of Cuba
Traitor drunk with rubles
They all get drunk as soon as the money shows up
As soon as the power shows up
The bay of pigs is all of us
We are all patsies
We believe we fight we love then we are betrayed
We are always betrayed
By prophets by revolutionaries by candidates
They are real when they start
They are all traitors in the end
All of them
All of them
All of them
All of them
Even you
Even you
Even you
Even you
RIP William Morgan
Fool
Dear moms we’ve made our peace
Our mind is clear and our spirit clear
-T. Weeks
@life_immense
(A response to “A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine”)
Life Immense 