3 Poems by Perry L. Powell

Escape

Where would you go if you could leave,
secretly without consequences
or pricked sensibilities, my love?
Someplace I am not?

I want to chew through your leather
straps and give you a new path
that you can wander,  that does not go
around and around and around.

We are not the Green George and the May Rose;
our harvest too long ago left the silo for markets abroad.
Now we sweep our little fields clean and meet
under a midnight sky where sometimes we touch

and sometimes there is moonlight
and sometimes only night.


Blue Fish

What if the brain
fades out
slowly
after death─
a drugged or dreamed trip,
oxygen starved,
in an immobile blue crypt of
flesh?

What if the mind
closes,
falling
into that
blinding light, slowly
sealing like a
slow-motion shutter ending
all?

What if heaven
is that
instant
of fading
feeling forever,
as a dream might
hold fast an image in its
slide?


Autumn Images

A gentle start to autumn.

Even an old man feels a touch of hope.

Smooth azure sky,
crisp all white clouds
and that mild breeze.

But every night on television
still more pictures of dead soldiers.


Bionote

Perry L. Powell lives in College Park, Georgia. His work has appeared in The Heron's Nest, Ribbons, Prune Juice, A Hundred Gourds, Indigo Rising, The Foliate Oak, Lucid Rhythms, The Lyric, Haiku Presence, Quantum Poetry Magazine, and The Camel Saloon.