Doug Stewart

She was a high-breasted back street thrush,
Who never really made it to Broadway,
She never really made anywhere plush,
But she tried, oh how she tried to sing the Blues
...

Arms they hid beneath their cloaks,
Intent beneath facades of peace,
And fixed their paths toward Montrouge,
A concert, and 130 dead Parisians, a City
...

...

I got ‘em, my plastic 32s
And without them, if they
We're not here, it would
Be so hard to chew.
...

She said she had supernatural eyes, for all I knew
It was so.
She said the moon told her how to behave, I thought then
It was rightly so.
...

Twilight dips below the hills, the stars rise, strewn;
Down the highway a diesel bellows its air horn,
Off to the east an angry owl screams at the moon.
Musing about life on Mars and thinking about morn.
...

When the wine stops flowing and the avocados
Fail, and the mountains no longer weep,
The wheat slowly curls to the ground where even beetles
Strangle from thirst, and when the songbirds cease to trill and rabbits rot,
...

There was a time before pain
When rare, when booze or women
Or a good ganga joint would relieve
Would repudiate, would vanquish
...

I saw Cinderella in a brand new blue Rolls Royce.
She was sitting in the back seat, she was wearing her shades,
Her Knightly Prince was next to her, he was studiously bored.
Sometimes after sundown, she wonders what it was went wrong.
...

Late night jazz oozes from the
Radio, flickering images on the
TV with the sound turned down.
...

Blah bip, bip, bip, Blah, you might ask, twng trll twng,
But a Prince among bah, bmp, bmp, bah deeply missed
Blah, blah blah, love, honor, respect brummp, brummp
God n’ mom n’ apple pie, triangle flag to do wop, do wop, do wop.
...

West of Elkhorn there is a cluster of white, concrete
Domes that once, back when the land was almost virginal
With roads, this was a motel. A place of rest, a place of trysts,
A place of fantasies, a place to hide, a lodge for broken suitcases.
...

The last steam engine dies with a puff and a sigh,
sanders dump their loads as drivers scream a skidding stop,
coming down from her last ride, vacuum brakes lose pressure
as the crowd breaks into applause, at that last Iron Horse.
...

A Tanka for Tada Chimako

In spring, Japan amidst cherry blossoms.
Ancient misanthropic divines, who dance, abandoning
...

A stands for Amazon, that mightiest of flows
B is for Bees work, industry, and the Arms of Napoleon
C can only be for Canine, that oldest of man’s friends
D is Discovery on a new infinitely great grand parent
...

They call him a singer, a poet with a 6 string, a disguise, but that just hides a story.
He sings about love and he sings about hate, of the tides comin’ in
and the crops bein’ late, but mostly he sings of his lost Camellia Anne.
...

Gaslight haunts the city, casting a warm, if eerie
Glow over the deeds of men, the acts of women,
And the hidden movements of the unquiet stone
...

If I have ever over-reached, sought that
Which lies beyond me, outside my grasp
And vision. Tried to hold in my hands, heart,
Or strained my intellect to catch and explore,
...

The city is wasted just before dawn, just after
The last shots have been poured and just before
The polished bankers arrive to orchestrate more
Theft. The city, you see, runs on golden greed.
...

He paused, set down his brush, closed the tube
Of pain and smiled. “Ut pictura, poesis, my friend,
As with painting, so with poetry.”
...