I would like to take a break from serious issues this week. I wrote these poems below for a creative writing class, and they are a variety of styles and topics.

Scanner

“Beep!” I exclaim, ad nauseam.
The grocer’s hand feeds
The machine’s hunger as I
Covets your items
With my crimson laser eye.

Your groceries are like a
Dilapidated city, cans
Like cylindrical silos filled
With nutritious waste.
The boxes are skyscrapers,
Towering above the other food.
Chips like fallen clouds, as if heavy
with sorrowful rain.

“Beep!” I cry, ad delirium.
Paper or Plastic?
“Do you want natural foliage pressed to fold?
Cheaper animal suffering folded to pressure?”

“Beep!” I lament…
Goodbye, muttered meaningfully.
Maybe next week you will linger longer.

Tempo

The tocks precede the ticks within.
Hands reach to strive like notes, so free.
The hymn is teased by songs of sin.
The tocks precede the ticks within,
To walk and dance for skin or kin?
To music must we all concede.
The tocks precede the ticks within.
Hands reach to strive like notes, so free.

An 1887 End

March 18th, 1887: The final hours of Roy Freedman, aspiring lawyer in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Suddenly, like snowy owls,
They swoop in and capture
Me, the outspoken little mouse,
Draping my head
With Derry’s Pound O’ Potatoes.

I count three, maybe four, gruff voices,
None of them like me.
The voices hidden behind masks
Pretend to be as if angels, so White,
But the souls inside
Are darker than my skin.

My sweat tastes like the sea
As it splashes slowly down my face,
My breath baking my eyes
With chokingly tense steam.

The cloth bag tears into my already
Tender cheeks,
Swollen from one too many fists.

With my sight stripped from me,
I stumble defiantly, as I will always be.
My calloused reward is
One cuff, two cuffs, three hands more.

I’m thrown to the ground
Like the dirt they picture me worth.
“Any last words, boy?”
Echoes muffled in my ear.

Despite my dogged defiance,
I can’t distinguish between
The burning cold beads of sweat
And these heavy last tears.
I can’t breathe in here. I can’t…

I apologize for the glum topic for the last poem, but I hope you enjoyed all of them nevertheless.