Devourers Zen focus music oozing through the speakers. You’re all scattered: not just breaths, but thoughts and feelings too. You’re calling all those seekers: poet, painter, dilettante that jots and poses: gather energy, create. The cosmos shimmers when they’re active and producing. Freed, you feed on them to sate your need for deathlessness. No hourglass sand will bury you, no unmarked grave will hold you if you channel them to help you leave a record: you, a maker, crazed and bold enough to fashion artifacts that grieve and laugh, that sing to their beholder, “I’m alive,” that stave off that devourer, Time.
Midlife (VI) A beer in front of me, wife blogging; dog whines, shakes himself: all’s well so far this year. Rereading ’60s poets: verses log in code the months, days, hours, and minutes dear to consciousness. Creation is the act surpassing all, and if the poem’s not so good, just write another. Mind’s intact for now: I leave my record, Rorschach blot a reader might interpret freely. When it’s published, it’s no longer mine: just ink or pixel, drowning silence, crowding space, awaiting entropy’s too-warm embrace. Buck up, I tell myself. Still time to think and feel before rebirth comes round again.
Thomas Zimmerman (he/him) teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review https://thebigwindowsreview.com/ at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His poems have appeared recently in hand picked poetry, Interstellar Literary Review, and Sage Cigarettes. His latest book is the poetry chapbook The House of Cerberus (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). Website: https:/thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com Twitter: @bwr_tom Instagram: tzman2012
Grand Little Things 