Poetry Offerings from Janet I. Buck Clean Silver  .Brownie Points.  .Aching Vacancy to order Janet's newest book a sampler Moongate's collection: Wilting Fuchsias A Silent Sonnet  ~  Black-belt Buddhas  ~  Dollar Signs That Steal Light Mosaic Mud  ~  Move'sMud  ~  The Oxygen Tank   Links to other web pages: Moongate Internationale                                             Clean Silver

  Pity's rice was over-cooked and sticking to our mental pan. Pigeons caught in jaws of eagles when it came to saving dreams. Cancer ate your second leg. Now your kidneys are complaining. Transplants can be done, of course, but it will take the match of love. This crisis dinghy seems to float among the rapids that we share. Sick-to-death of, well, transcending vapors in the cave of lame. Down depression's laundry chute. Hitting bottom dark and hard. I was born with birdseed bones and weak excuses for a hip. Yours were stolen like a purse in dark and cruel parking lots. Depression is a paper-shredder we could often do without. What we share involves denying creaking motion's slow retreat. "Pretty" would demand revision. Doctors had their way with us. We have scars like Brownie points that crystalize mortality. Answers in our aching hearts, their pages punched with incomplete.  

  I was only three years old when cancer's ugly dinosaur ate contents of my father's joy, left his mattress and his heart  a lop-sided saddle with bruises and cracks, a fact of life to ride regardless of the heat. With empty scrapbooks in my pen, I do not grieve your death in normal, comprehensive ways. Its aching vacancy exists. I cannot argue its point, but have no real grist for poetry, excepting sand of a sealed urn. Photos steeped in sepia are grass-clippings in a smelly can my fingers hate to rifle through. I've thought of you on nights of proms: you'd buff my shoes, paint my toenails in the dark,  teach me how to kiss a man, thread a needle, shape a pie. I've thought of you on wedding days: you'd have a hair brush in your hand, comb the knots of nervous tangles settled near moist baby's breath. Leper spots of sadness sit with venom in their secret moles. My love for you a string-less harp on stages of unopened plays. The copyright of your morning smile belongs to God or rings  around agnostic moons. I wish I knew your apron bows. Had your scent in borrowed sweaters piled on and buttoned up when times were ice and I was cold.