VQR Online

Nothing to hosanna,
you will be buried

Cold. Only the living
go on living.

Manna Man checks the internet. He glances over the Local sections of over three-hundred small-town weekly newspapers to which he subscribes. He takes notes. He categorizes and tries not to make assumptions. The mail carrier detests Manna...

His face coming briefly into view

As the crowd pushes

Toward the subway entrance.

In its frame of light it faintly glows,
like a projection screen […]

Whose name will be inscribed in the book
                                                                 just before mine?

His hair declared him his own bohemian, a middle-class free spirit
with a mortgage to pay down, a racing bike, a subscription to Netflix,
and a frau as deceptively frail as Hans Memling’s palest Madonna.

No, there will never be any shortage of labels; but at core, these academic designations will always remain, for me, rather bloodless. They will dance around my mind, flimsy moth-shadows; from time to time they will make cameo appearances...

The shadows creep across the lawn

In the silence of the afternoon.

A tiny wood raft was afloat
on the cold gray sea
of the cellar floor […]