The Real Stuff

By the din of the found melody,
real time unwinds
from which two-water solutions
are coaxed and sold to those
who think this is the real stuff,
the silveriest flottage
or below depth in the parlance,
while magic-buttoned
is a puffed cello blowing notes
like a pipe fitter abe to join
reed to tree, leg to elbow,
and bent mouth all the way
around to perfectly bent.

Jim Klein

Unspooling

keep it simple
the poem comes from your unformed thoughts not from a blueprint

let your relaxed mind unspool on the computer until it comes to something important
separate that out and throw the rest away

make it into grammar and natural language and rhythms
get rid of extra words and affectations

if there are rhymes they will have come from your unconscious
do it every day like prayer

the only sin is to be false
come Wednesday when you can make it

Jim Klein

Urned

A car pulls into a driveway
deep in shadow,
and focus falls sharply
on a tipped beach chair
hard by the rock garden:
a wedge of old man,
powerless to get back in.
He’s right.
Lots of this is funny.

To eschew a gravestone,
to be emptied into an urn, instead.
Then to be planted
between twin scrub pine
beneath a brass plaque
inscribed with his own poem:
he would have said
he had urned it.

To ride a horse,
to shoot a rifle,
to sit a building.
Something to live by.
The garage cameout a bit high.

On his hands and knees,
he dug out of sand
at the west end.
For what?
He told me, but I forgot.
Something about roses.

Rev. Ernst E. Klein (1916-1979)

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