Life Immense

Cracked, root riddled concrete,
Sprinkled with a confetti of insurgents.
Spouts of budding green innocence
Bursting from every sad jagged seam.

Lying amidst this embryonic forest,
A penny, tarnished, smooth, retired.
34 years afloat in the system,
Mediating countless transactions.

Your travels are lost my faux copper friend,
Tendered tenure of pockets and ash trays,
Unwitting watchman of wishes and wells,
Without a story you’ve become any penny.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “No Labor-Saving Machine”)

You’ll be comforted to know
My Bogeyman just barfed.
A patron of unforeseen doom,
Shadowed crusader of fright,
Glowing eyed minister of fear,
Is clutching the toilet bowl rim
Puking his sinister guts out.
The fog of fearing the specter
Lifted by a gastrointestinal spasm.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “Here the Frailest Leaves of Me”)

Today just sucked
There’s no other way to say it.
I missed my queues,
Stumbled over myself,
And sounded like an idiot.
I’m sure I offended some
And confused others.
Even this poem is crappy.
Tomorrow is coming,
Hope I don’t skew that up.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “A Promise to California”)

Here we sit under quilted silence,
Momentary rest from the fervid rhetoric,
Aromatic tension perfuming the room
As we steep in the energetic hush.

For this minute we are one body
As we, one mind, consider our state.
Uninvited, the rude gong bellows,
Intention shattered, and we are many.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “We Two Boys Together Clinging”)

I listen to the comic prowling through a story,
Belly down in the tall grass, haunches tense,
Patient, prepared, focused on the prey,
Elusive punchline caught in the perfect setup.

The trap springs, the take down is flawless,
The audience erupts, colliding with the zeitgeist.
Visceral laughter warms the hungry room
As I listen, envious of the mastery on stage.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “When I Peruse the Conquer’d Fame”)

Soliloquy of affirmations on tap
Shots of bravado lined up
Courage comes with one or two
Blindness when I can’t stop

-T. Weeks
(A response to “The Prairie-Grass Dividing”)

Faces horses
Rows columns
Companies legions
Armored attention
Forever waiting
Terracotta soldiers
Painstaking detail
Monumental minutiae
All make-believe

-T. Weeks
(A response to “I Hear It Was Charged Against Me”)

Tonight I’m the smartest man alive.
I scaled a problem, insurmountable,
I resolved an issue, unsolvable.
Line after line of text, comments,
For loops, conditionals, and arrays,
Lay prostrate on the battlefield
Of my intellectual conquest, executed.
Here before me, the spoils of my war,
Multicolored lines and fortunate dots
Surfacing a tale concealed in complexity.
Oh my friend, blessed stranger abroad,
Resident of France or China or Russia,
Perhaps you too will claim the title
But tonight I am the smartest man alive.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful”}

A river of red in front of me,
A river of white to my left,
Here I sit in this vehicle
The center of my universe.
In my universe, in the right lane,
I see the wind rattle the wipers.
But to the still evening air
I’m a 4-cylinder comet passing.
Next to me is a trapezoidal window,
Beyond which rushes this wind,
Then another car, another window.
I peer through all the glass
Into a parallel universe,
Centered on different driver.
In that universe I am nothing
But red and white lights.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “To a Stranger”)

Styrofoam triangles cross hatching
The floor, ceiling, and every wall
Squeeze the room in an anechoic fist.
“Will I die in here?” I wonder aloud,
Craving the comfort of my own sound,
Hearing my voice only after it rattles
Flatly through my jawbone to my ear.
I start to think about that oak tree,
The one growing in Louisiana. Alone.

-T. Weeks
(A response to “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing”)