Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Ralph Monday- A Poem


August, Christmas & Black Holes

Driving in August Dog days listening to
Christmas music. Pumpkins on the side of the
road and I just bought a Halloween sign at
Big Lots.

Can’t tell one season from the next anymore.
Religious believers say it’s a sign that Jesus
is coming.

I say it’s a sign that the only place the 18th
century can be found any longer is riding on a
rocket ship or in a stethoscope, and it ain’t
coming back.

Old mountain folk say to count the heavy
fogs in August to know how many winter
snows will come, and how much wood to
cut.

Those signs are a dying breed, sucked in
by the Beatles, Derrida, Foucault, that whole
death of reason carnival that gathered gravity
like a black hole at the center of a galaxy till
an entire culture has been vacuumed in.

What do we have now? A freak show with the
media as ring man, a plotless story so bad that
even it can’t be deconstructed, a place where the
inmates give therapy to the masses.

So look for the signs, any sign, that a hair crack
is flying through air.


Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 50 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book Empty Houses and American Renditions was published May 2015 by Aldrich Press. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer was published June 2015 by Odin Hill Press.

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