Wings of Fire by smzang

 

The cloudy halo of back street lamps
smolders in his smile.
A three piece suit couldn’t hide it,

Unlikely
that dockers and deck shoes
will disguise the feral cant
of brooding eyes.

His battlefields are well hidden
on the inside, so many old wounds
to anesthetize.

The scars are those
of any prisoner of war;
his words so gentle
they leave you bleeding.



 

First Draft by smzang

Picture this —
God creates heaven and earth,
the water and the light,
the vegetation and so forth.
Did He have a prior plan,
a blueprint that says this fits
and this won’t? Did he pluck
the petals from the first rose
and check them for perfection?

I  thought of Him today.
I do that a lot, but more so today
for I have questions.
I won’t trouble you with them
because I’m guessing
you have questions too.
Still, I wish I knew
His policy on revision
and how He feels about critique.

Loving a Catalpa Tree by smzang

A hornet’s nest
in the eaves of the old brownstone
was a conversation piece
long after the bees, and he, were gone.
Bees, hornets, it hardly matters,
There is little difference
in the sting.

Sometimes she loved him,
Sometimes she hated him.
She was glad there were no children.
When he came home,
it broke the routine, both the loving
and the hating. When he left
she blamed it on the lawn,

Nothing would grow there
but the old catalpa tree,  Even it
seemed to hate the barren landscape,
In a last ditch effort to be free,
its roots broke the bricks
of the sidewalk. The city sued her
and she paid the fine,

but she refused to take the tree down,
Its roots were poison,
its blooms a nuisance,
but they were the only flowers
that he ever gave her.