I stayed at home on the Fourth of July
And I pulled the shades so I didn't have to see the sky


charles a. kraus, peace, freedom...are they one in the same?

Old Phone-adelphia
-- by Eric Amling

Hey Bovine, a tiny application of brainwork
is needed to chew your cud. And like the owl
an analysis of your refuse says much about you,
but slash open the black bear and muck around
the innards of a larva city
there will be the valuable gallbladder.

For those who ride the perfect horse
with their favorite gun, in a lighthouse sweater,
nerdy-looking, a sky unadorned with no more Concords,
having a recent eye and ear infirmary service your skull,
the mind something terribly cinematic and daggy
like two nunchuck entangled ninjas frozen-to-death
atop the Matterhorn, or worse. Much like the conch shell

seems to have nothing of value inside, but the direct descendent
of the rotary phone, with which to extend our clairvoyance
to relatives in the city of narrow perimeters and say,
hey Kite, hey Skeleton Key, you’re the best.


Early Sunday Morning
-- by Edward Hirsch

I used to mock my father and his chums
for getting up early on Sunday morning
and drinking coffee at a local spot,
but now I'm one of those chumps.

No one cares about my old humiliations,
but they go on dragging through my sleep
like a string of empty tin cans rattling
behind an abandoned car.

It's like this: just when you think
you have forgotten that red-haired girl
who left you stranded in a parking lot
forty years ago, you wake up

early enough to see her disappearing
around the corner of your dream
on someone else's motorcycle,
roaring onto the highway at sunrise.

And so now I'm sitting in a dimly lit
café full of early- morning risers,
where the windows are covered with soot
and the coffee is warm and bitter.


The Ghost of Walter Benjamin Walks at Midnight
-- by Charles Wright

The world's an untranslatable language
without words or parts of speech.
It's a language of objects
Our tongues can't master,
but which we are the ardent subjects of.

If tree is tree in English,
and albero in Italian,
That's as close as we can come
To divinity, the language that circles the earth
and which we'll never speak.