Halloween Prayer

Halloween is coming

And the dead slough off

Depression with yellow leaves.

She turns from him.

His rictus grim smiling

Through days, alone nights.

Time, too, has a skeleton smile

And yellow leaves fall,

Skeleton trees grow bare.

The children laugh and scream and fight

As children do,

Embodying the monsters they don

To scour the neighbourhood.

Their nights together spent

Alone, each to each,

Not so much loss as separation,

Not so much ending as transformation.

Let this be a costume, too.

Let it come and go for a season

Until the cold trick is spent

And the treat remains,

Sweetness enough for another year.

Let there be another spring

                & love bloom again.

copyright (c) 2011 Daniel J. Bishop

Parking Haiku

If joyous parking

Cannot be arranged Friday

Please ignore haiku

Where I work, I don't have regular parking.  Sometimes, though, one can request parking, and, when possible, those requests are honoured.  


After a long string of parking requests of the standard "Is it possible to get parking for tomorrow?" type, I ended up writing some more interesting requests.  


Haikus.  A sonnet.  A limerick.

You really can have fun and be creative at work.

(Well, I guess that depends upon how your workplace responds!)

copyright (c) 2011 Daniel J. Bishop

Untitled

We begin
hours of joy
cut by sharp pangs
of loneliness.

We end
hours of loneliness
cut by sharp pangs
of joy.


copyright (c) 2011 Daniel J. Bishop

Far Dance Thrilling

Through the cotillion of hours two strangers met and met

and

would your music have fractured like the glass of the

screen,

    and would you have

                         gasped

                              as I kissed you

              there

                                       and there?

Wondering what your hair smells like fresh from the

shower or the

    grains of your skin pressed backwards and up.

         Can you exonerate me for letting you go

and for dancing with you under clouds and rain and

    what does it matter if I let you?

                                      Go

Stars and explosions and yellow confessions crossing

      Crucified decorated in yellow late at night on amber

screens,

                                               moved me.

      We wrote on the electrified walls and Jung synchronicity

           and Jung exciting motion,

            Brownian reflex motions,

              charged strings pulling the universal

                   fabric pulled us too.

      Willing, thrilling, cursor for cursor

we never met and the dancing was sweat, sweaty motion

      that leads nowhere pacing around and around electric

walls

      forever and nevermore words.  Worlds.

Will you forgive me for being your friend?

      Will you permit me to say it’s all right, to desire

            another’s arms provide you where I had aspired for

mine?

Pleasure that motion of words to continue without the

sweet sweaty

dancing,

      and what matters the sweetness when we never even

                                                        met?

By Daniel J. Bishop

Copyright © 1994, 1997, 2008, and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop

All Rights Reserved

This poem first appeared in Pandora's Box (ed. Mellissa Last) in the Fall 1994 issue.  It was scheduled to appear in a "Best Of" issue of Pandora's Box, which, as far as I am aware, never came to pass.  It was reprinted in the Sangreal Limited Edition chapbook.

The poem is about the nature of Internet/computer bulletin board relationships.  Naturally, times have changed since it was written, and the computer can now supply far more than a monochrome amber experience!  And we can share more than mere words, instantaneously, across the aether.  We still have the cursor for chatrooms and instant messaging, though, and I think that the general gist of the poem remains true.  


What matters the sweetness when we never even met?