Hi,

These are just a few short things I've written--three poems and the beginning of a story (Just a sorta prologue. If I write more of it I most post it.) Please read them and give your honest opinion. Loved them, hated them, my ears are open.

Oh, and see if you can help my diagnose why the hell I flunked Creative Writing. :eek:

---

Duty

I stepped in dog poop.

The smell stalks me around
like a poltergeist.
Like--
duty?
Dog duty on my shoe.

Imagine a world where shoe-poop is sacred:
“The duty is on your shoe.
With every breath
it is your responsibility
to whiff it in.
God sees your footsteps,
brown and pungent,
and they lead to heaven
or to hell.”

I don't fancy such
scatological sermon.
So grungy shoes
and Duty
I abjure,
by scraping the stuff
off my soul.

---

Telescope

The greenfly in the womb
can be pregnant
before birth.

You, too, are a greenfly.
Your ideas are already
having other ideas, and
the children you teach
are already teaching others,
sometime.

Keep in mind
that you have in you
your grandchildren
and your grandchildren's
grandchildren,
and you will be able
to look across the
gasping space between you
and stars and see them clearly;
you will realize that
your words are
already libraries, and
your children are
already dynasties,
sometime.

You are a greenfly,
infinitely fertile.

---

Reluctance

reluctance is to hold back
from that icy lake
teeth chattering like a snare drum

too shocking to swoop in whole
you dread that sudden total
immersion in liquid glacier
that full-body vice
like a snowman's mandible

gradually is worse
your toes freeze first
then your ankles petrify
and your kneecaps turn blue
then one by one
the lapping water reaches
all of your sensitive zones
like a child who hasn't learned
where not to touch

either is distasteful
so you teeter by the edge
shivering in the cold

reluctance is going to the movies
instead of doing schoolwork

you would like to put off
the frantic search through
spark notes that won't ignite
the stolen twenty-minute naps
and monitor's were-light blurred by tears
you would like to believe
for two hours those things
don't exist

and it is phones left to ring
chores put off
thoughts killed in utero
things neglected to mention
or with pieces (oops) left out

reluctance is not to jump
from fire to frying pan
because here is familiar

---

(Untitled for now.)

The priest was entering. His entrance was slow, bent forward, arms at his sides broken ropes, lumpy with old muscle. His placid scowl said, “I can see everything through these obstinate lids. I can see good and evil alike.”
The woman was lying on the bed. Her hand was on her stomach and she was paler than rock. The man who stood up was blacker than she was white, and when he stood in the doorway to close the wooden door behind the advancing priest you couldn't see his blackness against the empty night, but the woman wept, and the priest continued scowling.
The black man muttered a welcome. He sounded afraid even though he stood tall. But the priest was not afraid. He went to the woman quick; now he was in, and his arms were cables that pulled her up. He spat on her.
“I curse you. I said when I took you that I would see you to salvation. I recant that. You are beyond hope. I am done giving you forgiveness.”
“No,” she sobbed, flinging her hair, “No. Oh God, no, what have I done? My father, my father...”
He twisted his fingers around her wrists and pulled her in.
“You are living in sin with an animal. You are not my child.” And he was leaving, with the black man in tow, reluctantly following. He muttered, “Sir...” and the priest turned and slapped his face.
There was a moment of silence but there was no retaliation. He retreated to a chair and watched with fear like a beaten animal.
The priest put his finger to his mouth. Then, in one swift motion, he fell on the woman and pressed his hundred-year old lips to her belly that was swelling with an infant. The woman did not scream as he whispered something into her womb. She was silent.
He gasped it out. Slow and terrible.
“May you get what you want.”

---

Ummm.... so there it is. :o