New Poems

The Caretaker

In my park there is a wooded path

from the lowland to the high

where off to the side by chance I found

a garden plot sullied and forgotten,

overgrown with buckthorn and honeysuckle,

where in the center stood

a tree.

I am the caretaker. It is my job to bring it back.

As if beguiled, I hacked through the underbrush,

climbed to the treetop, careful not to fall,

and looked out, envisioning paradise,

then climbed down from my high perch

and set myself to work.

The Hub of The Wheel

The dam has sprung a leak

The water of miracles

Will drown me.

Gift of clear lungs

Sharp tongue

Vision unapprehended

Flowing through my fingers

Cold and pure.

Come for a visit to the corner of my eye

Leave the center of my vision alone.

For there is falseness, unreality,

Look away, look away

There is truth in nothing.

Nothing is the truth

The hub of the wheel

Is nowhere, look away.

New Poems

The Spider’s Song

Is it not too much to ask
to be the keeper
of one’s fate, the one
who feeds his own desires?

That is the tune played
on your instrument;
the threads sing songs
of succulent flies
struggling to keep their freedom,
and now you’ve captured one
in flight, as if you had
the vaunted wings themselves,
as if it were the end of all endeavor,
all spinning and planning,
the bridge from here to there.

You leap across the cosmos
of your conception
to spin out tunes
that bring the vast world
to you in your solitude.

You trap life’s essence
bundle and drain it
and sleep up in the corner
waiting for a note
to zing across your strings
announcing a new song.

© Joe Larkin
……………………………….



An Extended Life

Another one’s passed out of the world and we cannot cry.
The tubes and machines are disconnected and we sigh
sighs of relief and say she’s in a better place, and by God
she is. She spent her last two years crying, not knowing why,
or where her home went, who the people were who came to her
and where they went when they left or if they’d come another day,
and if she’d care. And she cried and cried for her lost children,
her mother and father who could not comfort her except in dreams
interspersed with nightmares of death and yearnings for death
when living death had taken her, left her bereft of hope.
And now, mercifully, she’s gone.
We hope she’ll recognize her old home.

As I look into the years ahead,
Life extended with prescription meds;
the little senior moment, forgotten name, word that slips the mind
I feel a nightmare coming on and fear those who would save me from myself.

© Joe Larkin