Poetry: Selections from Joe Sonnenblick

A Demented Dreamer

An occupant of a room whose door keeps getting knocked on, yet no one enters.

The elongation of this natural talent will never cease,

Whether deadpan or whimsy, or chronicles of how to lose your shirt and still be served in convenience stores…

I don’t want to explore sunken ships,

I don’t want to convene in a room with fluorescent lighting and compare journal entries based on a prompt some failure handed out,

Leave me in a darkened hovel

A pen,

A piece of papyrus,

A knuckle duster on my off hand.

If I ever decide to really drink again…

You lot are done for.

Former Baby, Future Ghost

 

Someone’s fleeing a murder scene right now,

Terminal breaths are being taken in and pushed out

An only child to be spoiled is crowning,

The weather seasonable in it’s mundane nothingness

Quiet over the morning light,

A woodpecker jabbing at the telephone pole

I wasn’t planning on making any calls.

I return to backyard,

After zone out

Hoping….

The murderer gets away

The nurse has to clean the excrement

The kid ruins your marriage

An arctic haze blows through.

I am not worried about your concern,

Truthfully,

You don’t matter here

The avarice to think otherwise is laughable

Lifting my drink to gods before me,

Who made me whole through their divinity.

 

Idyllic Hamptons Weekend

 

This man, a two-step slew away from a title

A no one in the game of life

Hours and the increments of the hours worried,

Beating heart renegade

Crystals don’t do it for the informed

Treehouse in the middle of the ocean,

Not coming down.

I am a crypt of long drawn shades and hands holding doors open for the same phantom on a revolving loop,

God bless the diner counter,

God bleeds the blood of black brother and sister who were persecuted over a cup of coffee.

A long in the tooth soothsayer,

Not predicting anything correctly

Just radiating profound farts,

Slowly turning into…

Contentment.

 

Hot, Sultry, Disturbed

 

Is life just a crooked picture fixed against a white wall?

Everyone points it out

No one knows how it got that way

They just know it looks untidy.

Along the treelined streets, sneezing blood

Beating your chest like original ape

Screaming old time relijun, zydeco muzak.

People who know that you have a fifty in your teeth,

They want your dental records

Writing in the shadows

Writhing in the tar pit

Now I know what it’s like,

To point out crooked pictures

It’s having no common sense at all,

While thinking you invented the hydrogen bomb.

Joe Sonnenblick is a Native New Yorker who was a regular contributor to the now defunct Citizen Brooklyn magazine. Joe has been featured in publications such as In Parentheses for their 6th volume of poetry and The Academy Of The Heart And Mind, and Impspire Literary Review, The Bond Street Review. Upcoming publications include: Aji for the Spring 2021 issue, and Ethel for the June/July 2021 issue.