Dec 22, 2022 | Gus Stevens, Irregular Rhyme, Multi-Syllabic Rhyme
I can no longer listen when the music plays, but shuffle, pause, piss, and then resume. Nothing’s ever missed, and nothing heard or seen. The glistening screen commands my gaze and all I do is consume, consume, consume— until the stomach presses on the spleen. A...
Nov 24, 2021 | Aging, Alexandrine, Gus Stevens, Irregular Rhyme, Quatrains
I am weary; I am not tired. Though only sleep and jest are true I do not think a rest will do. The river that once ran cold and clear now chokes with green. Mired with the accumulating silt of years. Youth was all constraint and indecision: a white-cold roiling to be...
Sep 5, 2021 | Gus Stevens, Humor, Irregular Rhyme
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -T.S. Eliot I scrape the gummy mess from the desks, the wall: the nametag of a favored student years before, then two more I can’t remember well. I walk again down an empty hall...
Jul 5, 2021 | Aging, Alexandrine, Commissioned, Gus Stevens, Irregular Rhyme
You wake before the birds, during the dark’s slow decay into the pale light of dawning day. Your mind holds thoughts— that hold no words, like dreams too-soon forgot. Outside, a lonesome cry, a beckoning belief that there is more than silent...
Jul 2, 2021 | Gus Stevens, Irregular Rhyme, Multi-Syllabic Rhyme
I doubt his oar had ever smote the wine dark sea when Homer, or whoever, wrote The Odyssey, nor had he spent a golden hour in the garden of a god. And so the ‘epic’ reads like virginal fantasy— fetish the clever, fever of stolen power; blind the warden;...
Dec 10, 2020 | Aging, Commissioned, Grief, Gus Stevens, Irregular Rhyme, Mom, Winter
She appears in the glass like a watermark and her image in the window tells the score. Her eyes, reflected, look blinkered, tired, sore as she scrapes the dishes clean. Inside: herself. Outside: the dark, and this old face between. It seemed just weeks...
