4 poems

by chuck leary

illustrations by pete palomine

poem time stood still when the blue girl picked the white flower and took it home and put it in a purple paper cup but it speeded up again when the red sheriff shot the green dog the orange sun beat down on the bald-faced lies of the time share salesman and the princess flew away to mars on the back of the silver-winged whale the reporter filed the story in the cracked telephone booth beside the abandoned drugstore in the pink sunset

wet you have never really been to corpus christi until you have been to albuquerque the panda didn’t like the strawberry ice cream cone or the way mrs osgood looked at him and no self respecting coyote or hammerhead shark would prefer a bathtub to a side of french fries not even one they could find in the wet pages of a telephone book thrown out in the rain in chillicothe ohio on may 19, 1965

avocado nobody likes me i have not a friend i tried to be nice but i could not pretend i am an avocado through and through it is what i am to myself i am true i am boring and nasty it is just my way and you bore me as well so i bid you good day when i die, when i die write this on my grave to fate an easy target to circumstance a slave

stupid poker game dream a poker game started it looked too heavy for me and i didn’t have much time i made an excuse i told them i had to go somewhere i forget where - laredo, denver, cleveland then i changed my mind i decided i really wanted to get in but all the seats were taken a couple of players took a break i wanted to get in the others insisted on waiting for them finally they came back then right away they went into the bathroom for a smoke i could hear them laughing then i woke up i knew it was a dream i wanted to go back to sleep so i could get in the game but i couldn’t get back to sleep