New poems by Frank C. Praeger

 

Large and Ignoble

 

I'm being eaten,

singed hair, cracked bones,

open sores.

So this is solitude

and no one cares

much like that large immobile tadpole

with soulful, pleading eyes

being eaten by a crowd

of smaller ferocious tadpoles

and no one cared there either.

I'm being eaten.

Two women come down on me, shaking what they got, shouting

"You're too, too

sensitive.

Get a life,

get on with it."

Laugh?

I would but I'm too hung up.

I'm being eaten.

Whose teeth, jaws, mouths?

Who salivate over me?

Wait a second, did I hear someone say mercy?

Mercy indeed, for me? Or better ants, dragonflies, cattle, pigs

and all the rest.

We're being eaten

even as we're eating.

Tra-la-la-la, eating and being eaten.

A dipsy-doo and I would be solemn

exuding gravitas if I could;

bar that, traces of the demonic.

 

 

Not to Be an Ex-

 

Pardon but

what I have heaved

further,

much further than dumbbells

or glitzy mimicries

of former selfs,

restlessly trying to sleep,

left twitching

by a road, hardly sentient, with a final calculated move

through some lack-lustre grey,

washed-out, galled, sanctioned

less and more, not to be an ex-, not to despair

but bellow fixated

once only

on catchalls

and the fetidness of

each twisted, turned from, leftover microscopic duress.

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