little red hen's taste

i retreated from Brooklyn’s America

retreated from Taiwan’s Taipei

retreat from the Han River Freeway new

recoil to the last unobscured mountain view

call it passive aggressiveness

this holding back of emotion

or one more chance to get it right

before it starts a fight

give up romantic goings on

give up carbohydrates and wine

but give up smoking and drinking booze

gonna buy myself a pair of shoes

leave the toys for the rich boys

the ones that laugh behind my back

a man has more than poverty

losing envy has set me free

feeling like the bumpers in pinball

lighting up all the lights

flipping to save another play

an eye on the ball that ricochets

what gives my life a meaning

unloading treasures saved

grass smells sweeter after a trim

move it away from the brim

give it away before it is taken

but not to the monk that takes

none to the freeloader’s waste

only for a little red hen’s taste

June 24, 2018
www.readingsandridings.jimdo.com

Purchase "Unnatural Beauty; Poems from the Han Riverside" here.

 Copyright © 2018 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved.

north of the southerly breeze

ah, to be north of the southerly breeze

to be invisible to ants scouting the bench’s eave

to have arrived at the place i am going

such pleasures as these

you will soon be knowing

understand why people watch a river

how one arrives in vehicles big and small

up to what they value

in the difference between hellish traffic

and heavenly bicycle path magic

i know why fishermen spend hours

in the midst of a morning lake

why golfers chase a ball to hit it farther

tee up  on a manicured lawn

into eighteen holes all day long

i see tennis spectators, soccer fans,

hockey puckers and basketball suckers

living vicariously without lifting fingers

for anything but zippers 

leaving the couch for nippers

every step along the way

engrossed with every breath i take

with moving objects getting attention

i quickly merge with that moment rush

then move on to forget it without a push

i follow the pixels on the screen

playing the same games every day

making new shapes from different angles 

like Captain Pike, Steve Reeves and Hawking

without moving, mountains talking

like Einstein’s brain in formaldehyde

faster than the speed of light

as empty as a black hole

i know how it must feel

and meditate on the unreal

like the inner groove of Sargent Pepper

or Who’s Sell Out skipping mantra

record skipping mantra

record skipping mantra

record skipping mantra

i nudge my tone arm for awareness

the way my lover moves me

out of that familiar groove

to every song on every side

i have to do it, i cannot hide

children of the world have toys

possess and covert accumulations

but as sure as a diamond cuts through all

comic book heroes and Hollywood 

become hollow as rotting wood

when the pen runs dry 

i sit watching the river flow

when the end of the day arrives

i find my dusty red dream squeezed 

somewhere north of the southerly breeze

June 16, 2018

www.readingsandridings.jimdo.com
Purchase "Unnatural Beauty; Poems from the Han Riverside" here.
 Copyright © 2018 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved.

ants from a lychee son

sitting by the river in its only dusky shade

unable to change the world that others made

like a son raised least he could eke out peace

living his life from a battered valise

filled with excuses having been said

and what i wanted to say instead

to a son too far to hear the call

flying high still a long way to fall

and ants at my feet, unrelentingly small

the ants from a discarded lychee 

treading on my feet, up my leg

i squash them back

for giving me flack

for maybe a killer sting

that might infect me,
itch and swell me

mistaken as a lychee

keep its venom from our family

my wayward son sets in the east

far from a Formosan feast

where once there was a way back

now crushed on a foreign tarmac

but i must move on, i cannot remain

in this dusky shade overcome with ant pain  

i must find a brighter bench to stay 

from an inundated shade of swarming ants

though a bright son shines behind my pants

pedal onward the path upstream

leaving the spot i thought i’d like to be

sighting a cool gazebo with no treading 

from a son who crawled around inside himself

then came crawling after me*

like ants from lychee on a trail of starving words

i am rewarded by the sweet sound of singing birds

what i would have missed if i had stubbornly stayed

to crush ants for the goal of a shade

June 9, 2018
www.readingsandridings.jimdo.com
 Copyright © 2018 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved.

*two lines borrowed from Phil Ochs "Tape from California"