Charles A Perrone

Still Wet Spell

It was a dark and rainy, not stormy, night.

The precipitation was really just heavy mist

but Mother Nature missed the message, and

She continued to add fuel to the fire non-stop

for the entire span of afterhours and spires of 

downspouts and gutters and drains and strains

on the credibility of all of us who witnessed

the days and weeks of waters from the sky by

the side of the aquatic barn and the aquifer of

accumulated baggage and clichés and leftovers

from the great flood of the middle ages of life

and subsequent wafting and rafting all the way

down river to the end of the event and dockage.

Good for Me:

I happened to hear someone place his excuse 

for noticeable changes in the muddle of the night

and I thought not to meddle in ranges of ways

since I am by nature a model citizen who has 

made all efforts to be neighborly indeed

and to accept such merry mutations gladly

 

Dear Diary Four

They asked me to dredge up memories of a memorable somebody,

maybe reconstruct some things she, or he, had said at some point.

So, OK, my choice is Julian, a guy I think of when I recall street life.

At my previous place of residence there was no framed structure

on the lot, which was actually quite nice, to look at and camp on.

Still the mail carrier (notice I did not use the word mailman)

would deliver to the curbside box, which survived despite all.

And where there's a curb, there's a gutter,

and where there's a gutter there's always the possibility

of there having been days when big-time drunkards would simply

pass out there and sleep all night or until someone roused them.

That is where Julian comes in, as he was one of the rum-fueled

visionary bums who would gaze at the fancy-ass gutters beneath

the roofs of the show-off houses across the street and imagine

that the rain spilling down the spouts was in reality wine, brew,

spirits, firewater, moonshine to illuminate their dank innards.

And, according to him, lest anyone think there's no there there,

you folks need only trade your own lunar-cy

for the bright lights of a tomorrow's solar-cy.

And there you have it. I never got it either.