Gary Glauber
Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He champions the underdog, and strives to survive the absurdities of life in these modern times. He has two collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press) and Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), and a chapbook, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press). A new chapbook of surreal poetry, The Covalence of Equanimity, is forthcoming via the James Tate International Poetry Prize contest from SurVision Magazine.
Chanticleer’s Call
Today a student asks if one awakened
from a medically induced coma
would feel relaxed and refreshed.
Exhausted after long hours of homework,
her wearied thoughts tend toward
such wry considerations.
I suggest exploring better options,
ones with less ethical baggage attached.
She sighs, daydreams about sleeping.
The class ponders why we measure time:
is it convenience of commonality
or merely means of establishing control
over universe of chaotic entropy?
We consider the dominion of trees,
the names of the world’s many winds,
the healing change of flowing water,
the nature of the present formed
by entity developed of the past,
the journey that takes it further away
from enviably curious innocence,
mantle of the young and the animals
toward some memento mori,
carved heart from past lovers
now dearly departed, their story
faded history reduced to initials
in peeling bark, sad disarray
of unknowable mysteries lost.
Lick a finger and measure the moment,
the time of day as well of season,
the questions that prove so hard to resist;
the reasons that beauty still lets us exist.
Sheila-Na-Gig online 