Tuesday poem #437 : Alexander Joseph : "I wake to another broken morning"

 

 

I wake to another broken morning
in the second shattered year
this time ten dead
where I used to buy deodorant 
and shampoo
and cheap candy 
and all the other plastic bottles
the health food store didn’t carry

there are so many poems lamenting
this sort of sickness
there is almost nothing left to say 

other than that I’m sorry
about all the young men
just a little unluckier than me
those with nothing left to lose
those who never had anything anyway

I’m sorry that we are all so close
to lancing the infection of our lives
of our hate
of this tainted inheritance
of all these empires of dry and poisoned dirt
onto whomever we happen to find

I’m sorry that it has come to this
and that it will come to this again
that there will be so many more mornings that start with bad news
under a sun hidden by clouds
and gun smoke
and forest fires 
and all the other ugly bright we hold in our hands

 

 

 

 

It's said in the Talmud that there are three ways to be a good Jew: study, prayer and acts of loving kindness– Alexander Shalom Joseph think of his writing and work as a teacher as a mix of all three. Alexander's poetry chapbook, Buttons and Bones, was published by above/ground press in 2021. His Novels and Short Stories have been short listed/finalist/ or semi-finalist in the 2021 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Fiction, the 2020 Orison Fiction prize, the 2020 Paper Nautilus Chapbook Prize, and the 2020, 2019 and 2018 Faulkner Awards for a “Novel in Progress," have been published by Tulip Tree Press, The Wall, Zodiac Magazine, Lotus Eater Magazine, Bombay Gin and in Clover: A Literary Rag, and have received four honorable mentions in New Writer Competitions for Glimmer Train Magazine. Alexander is the host of the podcast American Wasteland, and writes a weekly prose poetry column in The Mountain Ear Newspaper in Nederland, Colorado. Alexander has an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School, and lives in cabin in the woods of Colorado with his girlfriend and hundreds of books.

the Tuesday poem series is curated by rob mclennan