"Looking Up" and more work by Richard LeDue
Looking Up
Ants scurrying after fallen crackers,
all of which we pretend to ignore,
more focused on a cloud
shaped like a headless dragon,
a plane writing a poem in the jet stream,
and an imaginary conversation
with someone we never met,
which isn't much,
but until necks break
or our eyes are glued
shut, it's the best we got.
Productivity Poem
Black coffee mornings,
when the sunrise hurts
worse than that bruise
that took weeks to heal,
and you still don't know
how it happened,
so you turn off your brain,
letting thoughts paid by the hour
float to the top
like drowned fruit flies in beer.
Black coffee nights,
chasing after sleep
by lying still as a corpse,
wondering about reports
typed up in the right font,
emailed to the right person,
outlining the safest, right things,
only to for it all to feel so damn wrong.
Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He has been published both online and in print. He is the author of eight books of poetry. His latest book, “Secondhand Salvation,”was released from Alien Buddha Press in February 2023.