June 24-30, 2013: Rob Plath and Jim Bennett

All Day Long

i
hummed
to
myself

until
loneliness

became
a
virtue

All This Fuss

waiting around
just to become
a skeleton

Almost Everything Else is a Lie

freshly mopped floors

a lit stick of sandlewood

a pot of red lentil soup on the stovetop

the cat perched on the windowsill

leonard cohen singing in the other room

the kitchen window darkening

the unwritten poem’s arrival

letters to the editor

I had sat for two days the new job
bright and as clean as my desk
and my new typewriter
two days a week a journalist
in charge of my own column
‘Letters to the Editor’

I put out a tray to hold them
to wait for me to come read them
but a few days before publication
I had nothing a request for my column
to get the size the compositor said
I had to own up I was a failure
no one had written in there was nothing

they all start the same way he said
dear Editor after that you can write
what you like just ensure
it is not defamatory racist anything like that
we don’t have the money

so then my desk became a place of activity
the typewriter pounding
whenever I came in
letters fighting for space
all the local issues the letter of thanks
especially to local businesses
that happened to book up
a lifetime of advertising with us
I even had to sit some weeks
try and choose which of the letters
had most merit to be published

I left eventually when a three day a week
job was offered with a rival paper
when the announced my leaving
I wrote a letter to my old paper
saying as how I missed the
community spirit of the letters column
signed it “ a fervent reader”

the next week the letter page
had a letter from a reader saying
how much they preferred
the new column
my letter was never used
bastards