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 Poetry By Janet Buck
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When God Passed Out

I pass you
in a shaded alley
full of cans
and empty shoes
and crooked suns.
Their brassy shells
in littered heap
behind a war
you fought and lost.
I hug my purse and
hurry up my scurrying.
There is no art
in witnessing.
Winter fog is just a box
around the bricks
my apathy has handed you.
The dirt on your nose
(an arrow removed
from fairy tale)
caked blood
and defecation
from a pigeon
flocking to the luckless site
of bread lines
slow to recognize
the need for
human yeast
and benevolent flesh.
God, you think,
and then conclude,
must have been drunk
the night you were born,
forgotten to follow
the lead of a prayer.
Moonshine is
a greasy dime.

© Janet Buck 2002

More Poetry:
 Letters Hands Will Never Send
Easter Hams

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Bio: Janet Buck is a three-time Pushcart Nominee and the author of four collections of poetry. Her work has recently appeared in Three Candles, PoetryBay, Red River Review, The Foliate Oak, Ariga, Runes, Savoy Magazine, Artemis, Sand to Glass, Stirring, The Concrete Wolf, Poetry Magazine.com, Pierian Springs, sidereality, The Carriage House Review, Facets, Kimera, The Pedestal Magazine, The American Muse, and hundreds of journals world-wide. Recent awards include Sol Magazine's 2001 Poem of the Year, The 2001 Kota Press Anthology Prize, The Thunder Rain Award, and first place in Kimera's Poetry Contest 2001. For links to more of her work, see:

http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html
http://www.janetbuck.com