32. first dates
a. npo the man's head was apart from his body and a hoop passed around it and through the space where his neck should have been a magic trick called headless man b. hard cider from where he lay on the kitchen floor as she knelt over him he asked has the cider come into your milk yet years before she had tried to stab him through his heart but with a spoon #weeklypoemandpic 31. Beat the drum
dreams aren't prophetic. they’re about your last dinner. in my dream I had a gun but no one got shot. it was a paperweight securing Important Papers from the ceiling fan. idiot country is where I sometimes think we live. a cup of coffee followed by a nap. no traitors but treachery all around. my daughter is the first and only of her kind. let’s abandon cynicism. I'll explain my love for you by not explaining at all. #weeklypoemandpic 30. Slightly rhyming
A. A better father would eat with his  hands the way his daughter does. B. From the ferris wheel gondola stopped at its apogee I squinted carefully over the edge. Something I couldn’t remember what had already dropped over the ledge. My son asked: Dad are you scared? I wasn’t doing well up there. Not by a long stretch. C. The dappled light on the car’s roof a siren. The square of light on the front door a proclamation. We all have people we want to outlive and the opposite too. It’s not as though things end again and again but they do. #weeklypoemandpic 29. Adopted
The world will belong to the adopted. Everything there a product of revelation. Not the false piety of the admonished or the inert arrogance of the firstborn but the fish instructed in swimming or the bird taught late to fly. Suckled in the forest and in the town. Their domicile a house of fur and feathers. A porch for orphans and widows. The adopted rule the world from the third floor of that home sitting in a crow's nest not concerned with finding land. Because there everything is the sea. Land is a dream people have. People with one mother no knowledge of the waves and what it is to be above the salt and just beneath the sky. #weeklypoemandpic 27. Pandemic Restaurant Review 20/20
Amb- iation amb- inol amb- eotic amb- ition pre- serves itself within Win- ston’s walls. It is loud but the food dies dies does the talk- inness talk- scence talk- ing. Rest- ily rest- long rest- aurants are from long a- go go here when you can go a-gain. The chicken kieff is a com- uter com- ply com- fort com- plete sur- rendur sur- face -prise. The pan- pan- pan sauce gave pause. When was des-sert -erv- ing some thing some time its own re- redline re- turn re- ward? #weeklypoemandpic 26. Entomology
The ruler of bugs thinks we are slow moving ants creeping along the shelf over the backsplash. He said so: The insects are glorious. Unhurried. He noted the open mandibles as evidence of contentment. He said: Look at their swollen abdomens and dragging stingers. Crumbs are everywhere. The fly paper is up-- my son mistakes its stickiness for poison. Touch it I tell him then pull your hand away. #weeklypoemandpic Sirens grow louder.
Rumors of sirens. People talk about what may come. They look up. They look across. They hear sirens. They think maybe ambulance maybe police maybe firetruck. There are chants and names and we sit and we stand and we listen and summer comes and sirens come and sounds like sirens but not for you and not for me maybe for you maybe for me and a sound like a siren that sings of silence and insects calling and my son is calling for no sirens and for sleep. We don’t want to talk we want to sleep and the moon sieved through the leaves is quieter than the sirens. Momma cut the branches away from the neighbor tree so the moon could come through or was it so the sun could strike the garden or to hear the sirens better and wonder #weeklypoemandpic 24.
Bossy Bossy as a limp. He's a cover hog. I'm cold over here but he seems warm. He's made me believe I like it in Alaska. He blows on things to cool them. He blows on things to heat them. The purse of his lips is always the same. Sirens and pox coming over the bridge but his breeze carries infection far away. He wrote me a poison haiku. 19 syllables of cyanide. About v-less geese. The importance of the flock. The need for a leader. He led me south. I marched to his soothing rhythm. #weeklypoemandpic |
PS: Your Poem a Week w/Philippe Shils - he lives in central Illinois. He has chapbooks available from Underground Books, Right Hand Pointing Press, and a collaborative one with his band The Red Wheelbarrows available at gigs and on Facebook by request. He plays old time banjo and has two kids who are patient with their father. Weekly Archives
March 2022
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PS: Your Poem a Week w/ Philippe Shils
A poem and a picture weekly for a year. #weeklypoemandpic