Live Nude Poems

Fall and the Second Law of Thermodynamics It is the season of apples, crisp and tart. I transform them into crumbles, pies, and    comfort. They soften, lose their texture, sink into sugary union with the flour. September lifts the hazy skies of Missouri summer. Contours become clearer. The woods fill with yellow wildflowers; the species are easy to confuse. Does it matter for a poem whether this is  an ashy sunflower or a tickseed coreopsis? Confusion is easier than clarity. The second law of thermodynamics requires natureto fall from order into disorder. Atomic arrangements disintegrate. Ink dropped into a glass of water disperses, forms a cloud, spreads until the liquid is pale blue. Bubbles burst, unable to sustain surface tension. Organisms die. Autumn is the season of disordering. Of decay. Leaves fall; highly organized matter turns to soil. Returns to soil. Death is but an increase in entropy. If you look at it like that, there is nothing to fear. Agnes Vojta grew up in

Sisyphus Poets can't get enough of the boulder. Camus, who may as well have been a poet, said he loved that man in the frozen multiverse can choose to assert private meaning & justify the absurdity of existence, laughing back at the deathless gods, a savory bit of payback. My students call him Syphilis. Stop. I say, You're ruining the mood. Back to the rock: Gluck’s icy, but she rolls it easily. Homer’s is for Ajax to hurl, a ton weight. A millstone only Apollo can save Hector from, for now. I draw mine in dry erase on the wall by the window. Erudite vandalism? More small crimes for daily inspiration! Thinking less of Camus than reading D’aulaires, laughing when I read the husband/wife team wrote of the wily king on his return to the beloved, Fooled him again! Anything to be alive! To bask in the climb like Alex Honnold on the staggering face of El Capitan, smiling, granite-minded, all long handed limberness. Utterly prepared for the fab

9 / 12 After the sky fell on the City, swelling its canyons, the talus slopes of smoke and carnage, the names of missing spoken as pleas into camcorders that swish pan to passing sirens, in the quiet towns and muted cities, tv screens blink images against our staring eyes. At Fort Stewart we clean weapons and watch CNN, fingertip smell of gun oil as hand reaches up, rubbing chin in thought, looking into this widescreen scry glass, any news of who did this to the staggering city predicting our future. "100 percent accountability" releasing us, I pass the parade field, sunset making a shadow over ground where a grove of crape myrtles, each named for a soldier, will soon grow, knowing safety can be counted, the months of it limited by news we will receive, that it's finite like grains in a bullet. Across the world, a desert moon none of us has seen yet rises over Sadr City....Now, years and all of our deaths later, I can look up, see it, feel it, its beau

Street of Tears There was a man dragging a grand piano containing a stone tablet of the Ten Commandments down the street, and a woman poking a severed hand with a cane. Black ants emerged from a hole in the palm of the hand. I wished Baudelaire was alive to see it. Any time now I'm leaving for ... I don't know where. Baudelaire fled to Brussels to escape his creditors in France. Meanwhile, advanced syphilis was devastating his brain. He could only speak in disconnected words and phrases that might have been mistaken for poetry. Howie Good is the author of Gunmetal Sky , a 2021 poetry collection from Thirty West Publishing.