World Is Cold

You are groping for the wind,
Child, and I regret you'll never
Catch it.
I hate regrets,
Which are the stuttering of thoughts,
Or a loud fltus in church.

Primarily misunderstood,
You are neither neither here nor there:
You are between notion
And upheaval. You may never learn
The consequences
Of your inaction
When it comes to charity
(Real charity)
And unfeigned forgie.
sceneness-
Alone in the wilderness
Of an unthinking universe
You might expand

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poem by Stan Petrovich
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Boy Amid a Scattering of Stones

How could you?
I was waving goodbye in that photo
You were snapping it
A sapling I was
And cried my eyes out when I saw it
Somehow we were actually parting

Then you really left me
And I bent over crushed at coffinside
Really feeling the world firsthand
What the shattered rocks shattered for

Then the stones reached out
Hands to me
Teaching me how to dwell
Safely even in some tumble of rubbish
Like and like can attract
-No matter what the science teacher says-
Everything that can accrete will accrete
My wife and I suffered the rest together

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poem by Stan Petrovich
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True Story

A bar; a dive.
Ethanol springs, thrives.
The clown arrives;
The selfsame clown who,
To impress girls, speaks of the expanding universe,
then quickly misidentifies the speed increasIng,
At a distance,
As a 'paradox, '
When it the obvious function of the balloon expansion between galaxies.
'What is paradoxical, ' I offered, is what happens to tire very small.'
The clown: 'I just want to know what keeps a plane flying.' A hubbub of agreement.
So off I drove, lonely as usual, but with the satisfaction of being correct.
That is small, however,
As one drops into am empty bed.

poem by Stan Petrovich
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Polaris In The Eye

Our ship broke apart
Like so many paddle-boards,
Crushed between bergs
And attendant ice floes.
All hands were lost,
Into the frigid waters tossed,
Except me and my cur, Mutton,
Who, gravely injured, would die too soon.
I used him as warmth for awhile,
Then he transfigured into merely a useful bunch of frozen fur.
I had a partial tent
That, torn by the searing blow,
Became a mere sieve in the howl ahead.

To some Eskimo fires I had spied
In the distance
I prepared to go; my beard milky white,
The only way to live, to vie,
I trundled on, chewing warmth, Polaris in the eye.

poem by Stan Petrovich
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The Mountain Like A Lion

Windsor Seep was dry and covered
with pine cones and dirt; on hands and knees
I could never have extracted water
there for my barren tongue to lap.

The saddle, with deer plentiful
as pests, huddles my tent and me;
where I saw the spinning stars
against the towering twin peaks.

My boots were wired to my feet,
kicked by rocks and prickly pear,
whose fruit I'd had to eat
for the juice bound by a thousand neddles there.

Then, another night.
The winds of autumn howled down the peaks
like javelinas,
yet the mountain itself was a lion,

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poem by Stan Petrovich
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Clouds By Number

Cloud Nine lived a life of fantasy,
Barely conceding the existence of Cloud Eight,
Who felt jealousy for Cloud Seven's
Silver lining,
Although it was saturnine.
Cloud Six lived a life in a daze,
Dozing in the sun's rays;
While Cloud Five held a bellyful of rain
That it wept onto
The arid plain.
Cloud Four came out of nowhere,
Hugging Cloud Three,
Making way, hurriedly, for Cloud Two,
Who shot lightning and thunder,
And like a magic trick
Became Cloud One.
The Great Funnel Cloud,
Who left nothing after its short reign
But a painful memory and a swollen path to be filled with regrets.

poem by Stan Petrovich
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Faraway and So Near

Don't know how you're receiving this;
I not writing it down.
You see, I'm dead.
Killed slung as a tree stamped me out,40 miles per hour;

Solids are aglow,
And my haze is a timeless rhyme.

Usually I walk through walls, and even appear to a few sensitive folks;
Some days are foggier than the rest,
And I cannot concentrate:
For some reason I'm still in full ski gear (cumbersome) ,
But no longer is the snow cold, at all.

I stumble into an unfamiliar room; it is you I feel;
You don't have the means to turn and look at me:
It's the back of your neck I see...
And lightly begin to touch it.

poem by Stan Petrovich
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Mental Therapy

The following statement is true:
The previous statement is false.

I am torn and I am tossed,
Because I loved my mother
And hated my father
(One or the other) .
Every day I dread
Lie awake in bed):
Every night is a vigil,
For sleep is impossible.

He turns in the chair and says,
'We have to dig deeply into this.'
Psychology is to me vistigial,
Dream of reality, not physical,
Product of soothsayers who say no sooth.
Long in the tooth, they tell me
What I should examine;
But there is a famine:

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poem by Stan Petrovich
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Life Can Be

Life can be a little pat,
The limp handshake of a mounebank
Who steals you blind.
Life can be a poisoned substance,
Abuse, ethanol breaching your existence.
Tears gushing & accidents
Tearing off both legs,
Nose swollen red like an obscene fruit.

Or, Life can be a sultry sun
On a cold blizzard's day,
Warming you and your happy family,
Your fortuitous wife and beautiful child;
Life can be cool, cool water
Lying amidst the burning desert sands.

I, for one, would rather sit on the beach,
And watch pelicans diving for their catch,
Happily fed,
Flittering off then to an azure sky,

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poem by Stan Petrovich
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How To Make a Man

You need four things-
Silicon. quartz, titanium and wit.
Maybe a bit of the old drawing board, for foiled days.

He will be rusty at first,
Until you grant him speech,
To rise above the animals;
And then his desire to know what he is
Will be all-consuming.
It is only natural.

I like the idea of giving him a scowl;
For a robot shouldn't laugh at his maker.
Then a suit of blue clothes,
Nicely tailored for the world of wannabees.

He will make a living, all right.
But to raise a family is like being
A flock of birds in orderly flight.
If he does that, I'll make another:

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poem by Stan Petrovich
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