Skip to main content

Gawaine Caldwater Ross

Tool Shed

Hard rain rakes the roof of my shed.
It’s autumn, and the wind tosses the blanket
That serves as my door.
I wrap my quilt around me
And stare at the books on the wall.
There’s no electricity, and after dark
I can’t read by candlelight.
I haven’t a stove or a fridge;
I live on oatmeal, cabbage, and scraps of cheese.
I drink rain water, or tea,
If I can get a fire going outdoors.
Today when the storm  rolled in
I stripped and begged to be struck by lightning,
But Zeus was not obliging.
Yesterday in a state of helpless rage
I hammered a boulder into gravel;
It didn’t help my mood.
Two weeks ago I hiked to the coop
And posted a notice that said:
Help! I can’t find a job!
I have no cash, savings, bonds,
Gems, certificates, stocks,
Monies due, property, or anything else.
There’s been no response.
I’ve been homeless before -
This is nearly as bad.
I came here to be with Darla at her invitation,
The cabin is small, so we
Screwed outside in the summer sun,
Green leaves fell from buttocks.
But after only a month she declared
I bored her, and would have to go
Live in the tool shed instead.
I built the house she’s staying in,
But I don’t own it.
She brings back a new guy every week
Including an Italian fascist,
And she is Jewish!
She stated, “Commitment sounds like a jail term.”
Am I really that boring?
My friends say she’s sadistic,
But I love her so much,
I can’t let go of hope.
My Rockland friends want me
To go on the road and sing with them,
But I’d have to leave Darla,
And the band doesn’t pay.
Yo would give me pot to sell,
But I no longer believe in breaking the law.
I watch the rain flood the yard,
According to the news
There’ll be a frost tonight.
I put on extra clothing,
So much, it makes me stiff.
I stare at the ceiling,
Counting the cracks in the old whitewash.


Gawaine Caldwater Ross was born to a military family in Boston.  His family was troubled with alcoholism and schizophrenia. Gawaine spent 10 months in a mental hospital as a teenager and then lived on the streets. Homeless 5 times, and married 3 times, he eventually became a nurse. He has had poems published in various online journals and in a few small publications. He currently lives on a very pretty street in the Back Bay with a cheery little dog named Yayo.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Jim Daniels

Half Days My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself, fought an unidentified infection in her spine as it softened her discs into disappearance. I’d unread that story if she were young and still listened to lullabies. After she got discharged, I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot antibiotics into her port while she slept, her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return to school: half days—follow my dotted line smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs— at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring at her friends as they strolled across the street to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said, embarrassed by illness like hard acne or a blooming hickey, wrong music or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school jumper she no longer had to wear. I was there to drive her to

Corey Mesler

  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me