WestVirginiaVille

I read the national award-winning poet to juice my cadences. Maybe to steal his stately, nutritious, languorous lines. For it has been months since a pen, a real ink pen, touched down upon the snowy lined plains of my journal.

It serves no fruitful purpose to wax melancholic in your late middle years as rust-colored leaves drop, one by one by one by one, from the sycamores, the oaks and maples, and whatnot trees on this cold October morning.

In sweet coffeehouse sadness, we sit. We bemoaners and conjoiners, we well-outfitted outcasts of the digi-age. We brow-knitted worriers and patron saints of cappuccino.

There are cougars in these hills, high on slanted slopes, ranged with forests of matchstick-straight lodgepole pines. Places where few men and women, much less boys and girls, have been of late, if ever.

There’s a warrior in the window. Some Chinese gift shop in South Charleston, West Virginia. I’ve just had my back adjusted down the street, because, well, shite, age happens. And there he is.

If you declare some sequence of words a poem, is it a poem? Is the act, the declaration, sufficient?

Dammit Dammit Dammit. I say to myself, rounding the corner of a building on the Marshall University campus this morning espying my Honda. The sign of a hassle, flying its flag upon my windshield, a ticket.

I have spent my adult life rounding curves in the road here in West by god or so they say Virginia. There are curves around most every curve here.

A selection of poems from “Sprittling Secrets,” in the debut of “aFewPoems,” an occasional series on poetry found around the Village of WestVirginiaVille.

Some nights, I drag home from the office with all good intentions. I’ll finally write that piece about my thoughts on Occupy Whatever. But then, I got nothin’. But I got pictures.

A found poem pounces out the morning e-mail box. Surely, it does. But now I’m not so sure how surely best to phrase it.

No open casket. If you weren’t around to see my face before the undertaker’s scary Silly Putty makeover, then I’m just saying. Google my name, say goodbye to one of those pictures of me. I looked a lot better back then.

A curious, well-done, scrawled declaration intrigues the visitor passing a nook of an abandoned doorway along Summers Street in downtown Charleston, West Virginia.