Three Haiku for the Body Politic (2018)
Republicans and Democrats alike must serve their benefactors Two-party system makes branding differences easy to market How far we stray from humanistic ideals when money corrupts all
Tagged: michael konik poetry
Poem: The Guy in the Seat Next to You [Dodger Stadium Suite]
The challenge for a poet at the ball game is a triplicate predicament. He must not swoon over the greenness of the grass. He must not view every little lovely detail as a metaphor waiting to be transcribed for posterity. He must not recite rambling stories with no discernible point except to subtly imply it...
Poem: The Mussel Divine
How maddening to our friend the mollusk subjected every day to that most callous of clichés haunting a bi-valve’s life. Happy as… Each time the bitter oath was uttered, our friend the mollusk shrunk inward, as if he could escape the narrative of fate. If they only knew, he thought. No one should...
Poem: To a Progressive Friend Frightened of Progress
Your righteous race to accumulate Good Karma Requires making love And opposing hate This noble social justice quest cannot carve out exceptions To the covenant Between your values and yourself You cannot advocate for the homeless While cheerleading for the Wall Street Banks that put people out of homes You cannot advocate for Peace While...
Valentine’s Triolet
Why is this day unlike all the others? Wingless romantics pierce hearts, like Cupid, Who’d make love all year, if he had his druthers. Why is this day unlike all the others? We pair like doves, no need for another’s. Together we’re giddy, deliciously stupid. Why is this day unlike all the others? Wingless romantics,...
Poem: First Day of School
Bedroom window open to the night breezes, and the morning call to prayers, when the children arrive wearing newly purchased clothes memorialized by high-volume mothers with fancy phones. On the first day of school hidden hopes soar to their improbable zenith, touching the underside of the fine line between delusion and ambition. Anything is...
Poem: Life Sculptor
We don’t author our biographies. We sculpt them, chipping and chiseling, peeling back the onionskin strata accretions of time, calcified history. The layers of remaindered remnants. What’s been piled on previous to our arrival taunts just beyond our reach, like the inscrutable object of desire who can’t and will not ever requite our boundless love....
Poem: The Right Kind of Person
If you’re the kind of chappie who believes in predestination, a Calvinist narrative to be unspooled one frame at a time, this poem is not for you. If you are the kind of lassie who believes in free will, a steadfastly laissez-faire Locked fantasy to be imagined and enlivened one moment at a time, this...
Poem: Invisible
The powerless feel invisible. A ghostly cipher jigs and shimmies, sending up flares, announcing the Annunciation. The powerful seek invisibility. A malevolent cloud overhangs and shrouds, secreted in cracks, hidden from the light. We evaporate and expectorate and obviate. No one sees everything.
Poem: Facts
These are not theories, conjecture, reckless reckoning, supposition, hyperbolic hypotheses crooked as a triangle untangled by Isosceles. These are facts. Yet many of us prefer to pretend instead that the precise contrary is not a fairy tale but a fairly stale debate over which the irrational fantastical religious folks can masturbate. So I shall spell...
