Poetry:
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Insectivore
A flicker hopped through misty morning rain
under an arbor vitae on the hunt,
an ordinary species managing
the look of exotic panache. Cars passed
in an ephemeral spray, workers walked
blocks to the Metro, the usual stares
extended before them like hazard lights:
two worlds walled off by nothing more than time.
Spotted belly and comic mustached chest,
scarlet helmet and tourney-lance beak –
all alien functionality and yet
more stylish than most outfits off the rack.
What it found I don’t know; I kept going
for reasons I forgot within the hour.
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Television Ads for Software Services
No one chalks it up anymore without
a printout from the Smart Board. You can add
a stitch in time, and a gift horse too, unless
it’s from the Greeks. This system’s life cycle
won’t come anywhere close, which is OK,
if you’re a vendor or really believe
not in the old saws but more recent myths
of smarter, better, cheaper, and – oh yeah,
go tell the Lacedaemonians
or the marines. Some things never get old,
for everything else there’s entropy, then
no one knows your songs anymore and you
can put that in your book or did I mean
that other thing you’ve stared at all your life.
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Murders
If she had written chronicles of each
of the ongoing Taiping rebellions
in the forensic script beloved by all,
Offa’s dike would do more than just lie there.
Overtones of razor wire suffuse the vintage.
Accolades diminish towards the end
of a program not so long in the making
as wicked and untranslatable.
But we would seem blameless, having always
made pets of our conquered peoples before
moving on, leaving them unsatisfied
and confused. If you listen close you can hear
how personal devices declaim against time.
History ended, then the end times passed,
bringing us back to now and a state more
like summer crows, praying over road kill.
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All Purpose Sympathy Card
It’s silly saying sorry for your loss
as if it didn’t happen to us all
and rarely in a way we wouldn’t fear –
more than end, the last humiliation.
Ah but the sun’s come out again. The storm
swept through on the local news, leaving us
the usual tragedies and near escapes;
a day of fame or public sympathy
for the random few, as the rest of us
check our lights and open the daily bills.
Nothing I do will ever matter, yet
I do enjoy a drink or six with friends
The cardinal shows he’s just a massive finch.
The squirrels mimic street gangs in the yard.
Some dusk I’ll drink my final back yard toast.
The only loss I’m sorry for is mine.
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May Day
In the right mood no past atrocity
registers as any worse than the sun
baking the pavement on a summer day
as you sit in the shade with a cold drink.
What your teachers said, what you parents did,
the depredations of neighboring tribes,
might well have happened at the siege of Troy,
unfelt but for the slightest ashes and limp.
And anyway it’s not even summer yet;
those birds are still arriving and the cold
is a stalker who still returns at night
to try the windows and doors. Floorboards creak
innocently enough with memories
that make that right mood all the more remote.
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M. A. Schaffner has poetry recently published or forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Magma (UK), Stand (UK), Poetry Salzburg, and Frostwriting (Sweden). Other work includes the collection, The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys.
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