US Poems #31-33: Woman in Grocery Store/Dawns Here Are Quiet/ For Whom the Duck Grooms?

US-31 Woman in Grocery Store

Among the shoppers end of millennium

Our carts brush each other in the store

Plainly dressed you do not distinguish

Outstanding is your snow-white neck

And your skull delicate as a goose egg

With your black hair and black eyes

Above which are two black and bright brows

Echo the smiling and enticing lips

Neither aggressive nor humble your breasts

Refresh a virgin that might no longer be

Gracefully resting upon the pretty legs

Is a buttock tightly outlined by your jeans

You and I never exchanged eyes

Yet mine was dragged like a comet tail

As you melted into the Christmas lights

The darkness in my heart deepened more

Driving home I felt none but loneliness

An empty beach under a full winter noon

US-32 Dawns Here Are Quiet 20010819

Women are the beauty of the world
But wars do not discriminate
You have a husband
You have a boyfriend
You have the wonderful memories of the past
They kill you anyway

When there is no war
The mountains are pretty
But when bullets fly in the woods
You don't even have time to see the ugly

When you die
And the war is over
Your body turns into dust
Women are still beautiful
Mountains are still pretty
And you are now history

US-33 For Whom the Duck Grooms?

A lady does her make up
For the man who claims to be her love
But for whom does a duck
Grooms herself by the lake?

On this Saturday morning I sit
By the lake in Monterey town
To rinse my mind of the poison
Accumulated during the week

A white duck, fat and clumpsy
Quack quack she walks my way
And plunges into the lake for a swim
And comes back pecking her flume

She looks funny when doing so
And I wonder how they can show
Roasted duck in Chinatown
Delicious, but do they clone them?

The duck sings and flapps her wings
Her chest high, her head to the sky
And then she balances on one leg
And stretches the other, ballet on ice

No one drops a coin on the lawn
For the beautiful duck dance
No mirror she can use to watch
Herself in the morning exercise

She has only me as the audience
Me who is not all hearts on her show
For I am reading the Bible in Spanish
That I got from the San Carlos Church

Yet the duck does not care
She continues her morning grooming
She is then joined by other birds
Who all love to wear clean shirts.