It’s coffee and big windows. On Van Buren Street.
The crowd from one side to the other move in unison
When the lights say so. Go.
The rumble of the trains overhead for louder talk.
Or pause until it’s gone by.

I don’t touch the stuff. Coffee.
“What do you want from me?”

Again trains rumble overhead.
Going east this time.
Better yet write your demands
on napkins.
The blank side without the shop logo.

Demands.
“Do you know who I am?”
Van Buren street, busy.
The big buildings. Viaducts.
Coffee. Sandwich shops.
Downtown.
People in downtown dress.

Press themselves into seats
in these establishments.

“Do you know who I am?”
Just a lonely man really.
With a camera however
He does powerful things.

Included in her demands
Which he pockets.
“Going forward we’ll never come here again.” (glo)

I saw him and others saw him the strike the white man.
Unprovoked.
One man screamed,
“Don’t bring that shit around me and my daughter.”
In his arms his only child. Asleep.
Sunday night. Twilight.
The train had left the hub.
Southbound at dusk.
Southbound and most seats are filled.
From end to end.

I saw when he crossed from another car.
Followed by two dames. Two carriages,
One boy. One girl.

A Newport light 100 cigarette.
And the hapless white man.
After the cigarette lit, I saw him strike the man with his fist.
He’d declared he would as he took a long pull. Oh so long.

Melee, fight.
A man has a right to defend himself.
In the aisles no one would help him.
These thugs. Three of them now.
Children themselves.
He speaks for them somehow.
Ply them, supply them with spirit.
Can smell it on their breath.

Venom on their lips and their fists.
They beat him about the head.

I saw the man, just glimpses of him at this point.
Through all of this the train had not gone far.
They pushed him off at Bryn Mawr. (glo)

Smoking in the cooler.

The general store/gas station.
Prospect street.
Through the storeroom and kitchen
And to the right.

“We’re going to get robbed.
Just a hunch,” she said.
Nonplussed.

In the cooler.
With the beer and wine.
Chilled goods.

A motley crew of burnouts.
The rumpled blue shirted store manager.
One way mirror like
the glass doors
of the cooler.

The graveyard shift
A small town.

No cameras anywhere around.

Unmistakable though
from where she stands
The masked man and the gun.

Unmistakable the man
behind the mask
her second husband. (glo)

Brian (To Hoping The Phone Never Rings At This Number)

With your envy Brian.
With your wanderlust.
In the society pages.
Small towns midwest.
Like cities war torn.
Lives in his wake.
For envy.

Have you done your worst,
Brian?

Have you everything undone?
The voice reports:
"this number is temporarily out of service. (glo)

The Sleeping Giant In Their Sights

Red bugs, insects.
Leave a sensation of skin aflame.
Burning.
2:30 a.m. Lights on quickly.
Cigarette lighter
in hand to burn the lot of them.
Black spots blue couch.
Seek and destroy the nests.
Pajama pants of different colors tucked into socks.
Summer time.
Even long sleeved tops on
summer nights, since Winter.

Since Dartanyan pointed them out.
Good friend. Dartanyan.
His brother right behind him.
Since then, February, there abouts.
Bare skin, around the witching hour.
Searching. The sleeping Giant. (glo)

I am a fifty-year old civil servant/poet trying to overcome a middle class upbringing. I have had one full-length book (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press) and a few shorter-length books published, plus many more in magazines. The following is submission is of shorter poems with a futuristic slant. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Michael Ceraolo, 27600 Chardon Road #253, Willoughby Hills, Ohio 44092

Cloud Nine

-the code name
for the weather machine
now used as a weapon of war

Handbags and Gladrags

Now,
instead of buying items
with the designer's name on them,
for a higher price you could have
the designer's name imprinted on your skin

School Is Out

It took many centuries for the great change to take place,
but many worlds finally adapted Auden
for the educational curricula:
Thou shalt not commit a pseudo-science

Color My World

The sea remained its coat of many colors,
while on land
the gray mountains had become covered;
the white ice had gone missing;
and all had evolved into a true dichotomy:
either the lush green of the tropics
or the sere brown sands of the desert

Cortes the Killer

Earth germs did the same dirty work
on literal New Worlds
that they had done on the figurative ones

Blackbird

You and all your fine-feathered friends
were the Cassandras of the coming climate
unheeded until the changes were already inside the gates

-Michael Ceraolo
Thank you for your consideration.

I’m enclosing a selection of poetry as a submission to (A Brilliant) Record Magazine I have been published recently in Agni, Worcester Review, South Carolina Review and The Pedestal. with work upcoming in Poetry East and Cape Rock.
Sincerely,

John Grey

BLOODY GRASS

the usual moon battleground wildflowers of death
bloody grass tonight's light skewered by yesterday's
bloody grass shell casings of shadow
recognize anyone? the crazed walk is but a stumble
over insect bodies bloody grass and the hand pressed hard
against the face of the cold wind says prayers to the reaper
cricket dirge skeletons of sound the usual moon funeral
pallbearer wildflowers bloody grass moan of owls
shriek of mice one tear hopelessly frozen
bloody grass ancient curse mortality a thousand
times worse than reason

FEED THE WORLD

We pass a church just as bride and groom
exit through the front doors and the surrounding crowd
toss rice.
"What a waste," my wife says. "People in the third world
could use that." But what good would marriage do
the starving, I wonder.

SCHOOL ROOM

It's a school room shrieking with ghosts,
my own, my friends, my fathers, his friends,
and young boys, girls, by the thousands none of us knew,
some that nobody knew. There's probably a scratch
in a desk top somewhere for all of them, some stale
gum stuck under a rickety seat and forgotten
by all but these shreds of life that
left them there. There's ghosts in the chalk dust,
ghosts in the erasers. They're rising up
out of ink stains like hands in graveyards.
They have to sit here and obsess again.
They need to run their eyes once more
from the teacher through the window
to the fields outside, imagining the future
while a pocket knife etches their name
in the oak. They have to stand by
that scrawl while their older selves
pass on. They have to defend it
with their lives and now their deaths.
It was dark and hopeless here
but it could get better. It was dark and hopeless to come
and here the spirits get by not knowing that.

SHOED

Once again I will put the foot in a shoe while the head goes unprotected
and the rest of the body is wrapped in nothing but flimsy
shirt and trousers and underwear. And the heart only pretends
that its shield of ribs could hold back armies.
And the guts think it's all settled that a ripe belly will
brook no interference. And what of the soul?
The soul's not all that convinced
that it exists so what kind of cordon is that
to draw around it? But the foot fits into hard leather
and no tack will penetrate, no rock annoy,
no hot surface bum to a cinder. It's time once more for my walk.
My feet are safe but must my thoughts come too.

FEMALE ALLIGATOR GUARDS HER NEST MOUND

Just a mound of sticks and straw
but she circles it like it's Fort Knox .
At a raccoon's unwitting approach, she
bares her teeth like it's an enemy army.
She would launch herself, without fear,
against the shelling of the rain,
the fearsome firepower of the wind,
if any storm should try something here.
But mostly she waits patiently, alert,
in this shell of mangrove, muggy heat,
while her albumen-locked babies, fierce
with life, wiggle in their chalky dark.

EMAIL WORLD

Without email, Gordon would be dead.
He'd be the suicide you read about in small print in your newspaper.
He drinks this correspondence. He eats it right off the screen.
To him, the sweetest words on the planet are "You have mail"
What's he care if someone is trying to sell him cut-rate drugs
from Canada or a penis enlarger or a penny stock about to shock the world.
Every day, it's the same excitement. He drools over each message.
His mailbox is his harem. And many is the wife that he responds to.
So what if the Nigerians took his savings. And some hacker in California
is bleeding his MasterCard dry. People care enough to write to him.
And he takes the time to write to them in return.
He's at the center of something warm and wonderful. Communication.
Friends try but fail him. But thank God strangers have his address.