Paperweight Poetry

Bad poetry in a breakroom, semi colons and tuna fish sandwiches as allies, what do I know about life? Nothing. But maybe that's the same thing as knowing everything about it, I've written psalms on palms and wondered if watercolor came from a plane full of paint diving into a river; Rivers, phantoms with blue pants. What do I know about life? Nothing. Which is the same thing as knowing everything. Babes introduced into cold air with cold hands that snip umbilical cords, know just as much as persons pocked in unkept promises and hearts gutted like fish, they know just as much as the rivers. Because babes are later dressed as thirty-minute bad poets in the breakroom, phantoms wearing blue pants and a hard hat, I used to have dreams, and this is what they have come to, scrabble and cold coffee, and maybe my ideology is just as short as lightning in a window, but just maybe I'm alive and maybe that means something. -anna sluder 

Cigarette ends like red poppy seeds and the moon just like peeling skin, a clipped fingernail and yet no person to be first to criticize. The beggar speaks French and the treetops speak French and the clipped fingernail speaks French but the world speaks dead languages like buried ideas with a bell in their coffin, and beggar with an umbrella frame and no fabric challenges the clipped fingernail moon, and dead-language speaking world combs their mustache and laughs like the sneering faces at a dogfight, and beggar asks for money in exchange for a poem he will write for world, to but beggar criticizes clipped fingernail moon, but beggar speaks French, and does not gather others' hair and paste it to his upper lip and comb it at dogfights, he does not sleep with buried ideas, beggar sleeps under bridges with bellies of jazz and hands that are rusted saxophones, and world doesn't even know his name, it's too French. -anna sluder