Mike Finley Poems

I took my boy to the battlefield
and we paused in the locust grass
to read a warning sign, 'Beware
of rattlesnakes. Stay on the path! '
...

'No, you've got this part all wrong, '
Says Gise, swatting a poem about birds
With the back of one hand.
...

On Sunday when the family was camping
Three miles up the Colorado from town,
The little boy wandered too close to the water.
His sister screamed as he was carried away
...

There are no fields
Between the plane
And the ground below.
The farmlands look like
...

Yanked off the porch, I follow the pack
to the high fields,
leaping over fallen trees,
splashing through ditches,
...

The walls I made them run toward
Were the ones they themselves built
To keep me out and my mixed kind.
I swear I could watch these
...

We sleep in armor again tonight,
Like tipped over beetles.
We roll, we roll,
And the roaches rattle through our limbs
...

God make me an idiot
Oblivious to sense.

I don't want to care
...

God save me from salesmen
and preachers in denim.

From long conversations
...

To the extent that it is educational to suffer,
And there lessons you wanted to teach.
Lord we get it.
...