Don Kingfisher Campbell

 

You and Me

 

You like to see me

wearing basketball shorts

 

I look at you and enjoy curvy

stripes across your chest

 

But we are really painting

a domestic banner together

 

Me, sitting on a sofa

papers strewn about us

 

There is even a white plastic

trash can, for target practice

 

In my heart, I want to create

a poem that is a poster of two

 

Moments when we watch

leaves dance outside the blinds

 

In our dining room with

a Chinese calendar next

to a psychedelic tapestry

 

And you like to cut napkins

in half while I blow my nose

 

I guess this will be a notebook

page of the daily times we share

 

We both like to drink from hot

mugs, you coffee and me tea

She is a firework in my life

 

She makes my heart go boom

My breaths fall away like dominoes

My body wants to get on her bicycle

And ride, ride, ride until my mind       

Until her mind says the train

Our train is coming to the station

And I hug security and comfort

We have become family I plan

We plan our day and then we act

Shower dress breakfast brush exit

Into the optimistic world that is ours

And I pray we'll have decades we

Knowing our forms age as we go

Forward into unforeseeable future

From the Blue Bible, onward...*

 

I encountered James Tate's taxonomy of tight twists

I enrolled in the Henri Coulette school of sweet soliloquies

I met Michael Shepler & saw short stuff is significant too

I ventured off into Marcielle Brandler's bashes of bountiful blues

I tutelaged under Jack Grapes' great gut-busting gustos

I overwhelmed to John Milton's murky mess of mellifluousness

I studied Emily Dickinson's daring dollops of denial

I copied Stephen Crane's creative classics of contrasts

I mimicked Gregory Corso’s condemnation of conjugal captivity

I relived Gary Soto's storytelling of unsafe streets

My ears danced to Kamau Daaood's delightful discourses of days

I sought out Mike Carlin's home for hifalutin humour

I reveled rifling through Michele Serros sexy sibilant stories

I chanced upon Carl Stilwell's southern strategies for soirees

I glorified in Ellyn Maybe's masterful mullings of multitudes

I flocked to join Larry Jaffe's jovial jubilant joints

I pleasured in Rick Lupert's likeable lineage of LOL

I dog-eared Murray Thomas' tasty tomes of topography

I devoured Jeffrey McDaniel's musing magic on mankind

I traveled inside Luis Javier Rodriguez's roads of rough remembrance

I joyed to Lois P. Jones' lines of long lusciousness

I riffed to Mike Sonksen's sacred sounds of cities

I dug Matt Sedillo's sonorous scathings of society

I amazed at Marvinlouis Dorsey's devastatingly deadly diatribes

I blew my mind with Alicia Viguer-Espert's expert enunciations of ecstasy

I found kinship inside Jackie Chou's catty collection of catastrophes

I lolled in Gregory Foster's (G.T.'s) fruitful funky foundation

I astounded to Coco’s uncompromised unicorn creations

I knelt for Traci Akemi Kato-kiriyama's kancer killing kollection

I sought a daily dose of Rich Ferguson's fun Facebook fonetics

Even my Alexis Rhone Fancher-like fantasy was filled as one of her fantastic fotos

Because of all these powerful poets for dedicated decades now

I have produced my own publishing palace for poesies           

 

* Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry