3 Poems By Perry L. Powell

Holdings

They attack at night, the worries…

During the day there are conferences and calls and
email and work to oversee and whatnot.
But at night they arrive
in full phalanx―
the day's regrets,
the people I have hurt,
the naked moments, the
other reasons for endings.

But in the morning your skin reminds me
I am no longer my own
to do with as I wish.


Lately

Lately,
this sense of final  things
has come to me
with some broad determination,

it has come to me
gently,
like an old friend who remembers your faults
and almost forgives them,

it has come to me
with the sweet sadness of kidnapped regrets,
and the occasional found treasure,

it has come to me
(in all fairness)
with that kind of relieved resignation
in knowing that nothing is really nothing,

and it has come to me
to say
that the moment
(that moment)
may not be
dreadful
after all.


The Book

I wish I could read it again,
that book I read once
when the sun burned a path
over library shelves
onto sparkling pages.

The words remain.
But they are not the words
I read then.

Once there were cities in the desert
along the Silk Road.
Now there are too many stories
to remember one.

I will turn the next page
in my sleep.

Bionote

Perry L. Powell is a systems analyst who lives and writes near Atlanta, Georgia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Pacific, A Handful of Stones, A Hundred Gourds, Atavic Poetry, Dead Snakes, Decades Review, Deep Water literary Journal, Frogpond, Haiku Presence, Indigo Rising, Lucid Rhythms, Mobius The Journal of Social Change, Prune Juice, Quantum Poetry Magazine, Ribbons, small stones, The Blue Hour, The Camel Saloon, The Credo, The Foliate Oak, The Heron's Nest, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Lyric, The Mind[less] Muse, The Rotary Dial, Turtle Island Quarterly, and Wolf Willow Journal.