word poems

The Early Days of Poetry

The word
expired
on a
virus
splaat!

the asteroid 
took off
its hat

metaphors
were facile
and easy

you picked them off a tree
all sleepy & sneezy

before
the academy.                                  

- J.V. ca. 1985

Red Star

very bitter
cold industrial plain
south of Marquette
in the way early winter morning 

on way to class and
sickening smell of
Red Star Yeast
factory in action
hanging in
the frigid air.

- J.V. ca. 2010

Film Dream

I've gotten a job sort of an assignment to drive an individual from Chicago to Milwaukee. Very futuristic airport the modern style white like a stellar sail clipper.  The person I have to pick up is sort of Austrian nobility. Not very talkative. Has small entourage of people who are also not talking too much. I want to get going but we have to wait. some kind of backstory will flash now and then. Story has something to do with people that have had great moments of pain and I'm one of them.  In a flashback I have a terrible soccer injury in my youth. The Austrian nobility is consumed by phone calls. Fade to a flashback to his past and apparently he's a philosopher. He's a philosopher who has some type of theory and he's here to go up Wisconsin way maybe to deal with a leader of a cult that has misunderstood misinterpreted and incorrectly promulgated his theories. I don't know much about his theories but there's a flashback that shows him work with wooden disks with exceptional Boy Scout band saws capable of hexadiagonal embedations. Funny to me because I am reading a book about the Bauhaus. I'm concerned as time keeps going by. I am going to meet my friends up north there in Wisconsin and all this waiting is gumming up the works.  J.V., 2022