Poems
by Richard
LeDue
A Staring Contest With the Dark
As strawberry sundaes
dream of being pistols,
killing someone important
enough to make them famous,
I lie awake, telling myself lies,
like I'm winning a staring contest
with the dark, that my sweet-tooth
didn't die years ago, and the only bullets
I have don't match any of my guns,
leaving the night to write another poem
all over me.
Death for $50 a Jug
Maybe our deaths will be efficient
as a jug of insecticide
we didn't even bother to read the instructions for,
and as we twitch our final twitch,
we'll become one with the bugs
we hated enough to resort to amateur biological warfare,
while the salesman who recommended it
seemed nice and helpful enough
to make us forget it's the worms
we should be worried about.
Dying on My Feet
My epic thoughts about death have died,
replaced with worries about investments,
mortgage rates, inflation, and the price
of diapers, leaving me dying on my feet,
with my eyes boring as a door frame,
while I shake inside like an unseen earthquake
that causes a tsunami,
bringing the sort of destruction which feels
like vengeance, even though it's just
another part of nature.
Hoping For a Crash Landing
Maybe tomorrow will be a blank page,
while yesterday is a bunch of crossed out words
(adjectives trying too hard
to be nouns), and right now is this
poem, scribbled on dollar store paper
and dead as a pinned butterfly,
who probably never thought flight
could be impaled so precisely.
The whisky helps
ease the pain from another day
measured in money.
dull the church spires,
trying their damnedest to scratch an itch
many call “god.”
silence the dead,
who only ask to be remembered.
love speak up
at those times when loneliness shushes
our beating hearts.
