Three Poems by A.D. Winans

POEM FOR MY MOTHER

My mother’s eyes stare at me
Like a wounded doe
Staring into a rifle scope

Her smile fades
Like watercolors from
A worn canvass

The months grow antlers
The year’s fangs
Time a barbed wire fence
Tears at my soul

The shadow of my ancestors
Stalks my dreams
Like an aging warrior
Tracking game
My mother’s eyes smoldering
Like hot ashes
In a Hiroshima graveyard

____________

 

FOR LADY LYNNE

New York days and nights
Lodged in the back of my skull
Like tiny splinters beneath
A hangnail
My mind stoned
Like Merlin the Magician
On a starless night
Lost in a whirlwind of lust
That comes and goes
Like a fevered dream
My words empty as a tramp’s pocket
As you allow me to probe
The lining of your soul
As we make it one last time
To the music of a thousand crickets
Rubbing their hind-legs in applause

____________

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

She was like a gunslinger of old
Quick on the draw
A master at mind games
Sitting in the garden growing flowers
Playing he loves me he loves me not
And I should have known it was over
When she sent me an e-mail sayig
“Beware of Scorpio’s
They will bite you in the ass
Every time

When you’re young
A female smile can get you hard
When you get older that same smile
Can be like walking the last mile
And you know it’s time to move on
When you begin to feel
Like the words to a bad song
The betrayal not the reason
But the last straw
She of loveless love letters
That lay on the page
Like a corpse on a slab
At the morgue