Monday, September 30, 2013

Melanie Browne- Three Poems

 
Wandering the Wilderness with a Cappuccino and a quarter tank of gas

Lately I have taken to
wandering in the
existential wilderness
it is a strange place,
with no Burger Kings
or Starbucks,
only Sartre and
Jung and large
doses of cappuccino,
I have no compass,
no GPS if I get lost,
and only my mind
to hack through
the underbrush,
but my mind is
not trustworthy-
& why i am in
the wilderness
to start with



The Problem of Time

Sartre says time is too large;
that it cannot be filled up,
but we try to fill it
with all kinds of nonsense,
such as what we think of one
another, the dimple in our
elbows, whether to buy
organic fruit or some
cheap malt liquor,
our time-fillers are not so different from
each other, our politics
all weigh very much the same
on a boredom scale,
our tedious obsessions
smell like drug store knock
off cologne or an elephant stampede
take your pick of these time fillers,
Sartre says they will melt
like the witch of the East,
my suggestion is to gamble
on the light of the moon,
to bet on the milky way,
our thoughts not worth
a carton of cigarettes
as time will only spit
them out into the abyss



i, misanthrope

Saturday morning,
the high school
marching band
starts to intrude
on my dreams,
they are marching
through the neighborhood
to raise money
for a trip or something,
crap,those drums are loud
i say to the world.
Just the other day
I found the t-shirt
my brother made for me,
the one that says misanthrope
and I run my fingers
across the letters,
i say it over and over
mis-an-thrope,
and I pull the shirt
over my head and
nurse a small hangover
with a giant cup of coffee,
wishing i had gotten up sooner

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