Home Page | 2008 Ghazals | 2007 Ghazals | Prose | Links | Information | Email | Archives
Autumn leaving and we know it's coming — outdoor sugar,
snow sweetening the mouth's appetite for starch or sugar.
I slice the apples cross-wise. Mix with curled fingers the flour
and cinnamon, squeeze softened butter with more, yes more, sugar.
Eat breakfast in bed like the hour isn't always too late, buttered
croissants and dark coffee. Don't measure with spoons. Pour sugar.
Honey, oh baby, I long for you in these longest nights. Don't hibernate
and shrink in the dark. My blood slows. Shock it with your sugar.
The moon can't keep me from you. It spreads and glazes the grass
and I graze a path, nibbling candied moondrops, hungry for sugar.
When the intrusive sun stays and the body can no longer hide,
my tongue licks light this season, tasting neither salt nor sugar.
Crying babies need the soothing, honey taste of sugar.
Happy children love to frolic with their treats of sugar.
Most of their days are drab and ordinary until
Aunts and uncles come visit with their gifts of sugar.
Children never dream of leaving such a childhood state.
How can they be happy in a world without sugar?
How would we cope with spoons, bowls, and our cravings,
If, despite all efforts, we had no sugar.
There surely would be cities hid in ugly darkness;
Ones where never would be found glad treats of sugar.
If all the Bens in the world would hold faith in children's dreams,
Surely we would wake up in a wide-eyed world of sugar.
Snips and snails and puppies' tails I early learned composed my bones;
and naught I am is sugar.
Tell me I am nothing sweet, yet all I sense of me — and how distraught
I am! — is sugar.
Honeysuckle and Vanilla: shirtless, dancing in their shoes, they
fought like frenzied boxers.
Devils' hells belied the smells of sweeter flowers; all I've ever
sought I am, is sugar.
Not a sparrow in God's hand, but lice within an old man's beard — and
ought I be embarrassed?
If you catch more flies with honey, Lord, how many has your slogan
caught: I Am is sugar.
Hooker walked a one-way street: the man she'd have would not be had
nor bought nor begged nor borrowed.
Why won't any drink my cup or scrape my bowl or lick my spoon when
what I am is sugar?
Boys but boys will be — and he'd be me with masculinity more fraught
with fear than envy.
White, refined and empty — all King Wasp would want (while iron-wrought
I am) is sugar.
Only on its foremost tip the human tongue may taste the sweetness
slaughtered there by sugar.
Deeper in my mouth and throat I taste of me; how strange, when what I
thought I am is sugar.
Strong and Smart and Skilled and Sensitive and Stoic, Suave and Sweet:
he brought them in sublimely.
Plod of breathing clay to be a man of men — and naught of what I'm
taught I am is sugar.
My mother used to call me Sugar.
What did I have to do with C12H22O11?
My present wife likes to revisit spontaneous passion.
Observe the smirking bed, its sheets white as sugar.
Meter maid on her cell at Starbuck's: "No, it just looks dead.
Feed it something. Anything. Lettuce, crickets, sugar."
My toothsome seatmate on the Bangor flight
eats from a hand-labeled sack: SUGAR.
"Pass it. No, not the Equal. And for sure not the Splenda.
This is All Bran, stupid. Pass the goddamned sugar."
Hem and haw sound like nautical terms.
Actually they're lost-language words for sugar.