Do what I tell you to do
your face is like flour dough
your nose like a slant directionally
unknown like an adverb–
tossed into space.
Your hat is like an angel
wedding gown draped
over vodka body
like a Christ shield
protecting you in innocence.
It is here I kiss your lips as a total stranger;
bring myself closely to your eyes;
camp out on your [...]

[Read more →]

I see the spring dance all over your face in green
you were arrogant before you viewed my willow tree
outside my balcony.
Now you wave at me
with green fingers
and lime smiles.
You twist my words,
Harvard collegiate style,
right where you want them to be–
lime green, willow tree, and
dark skinned branches.
About the Author
Michael Lee Johnson is a poet and freelance [...]

[Read more →]

Salvation Army and
the Christians arrived today,
Christmas, like every other Sunday morning
feed the homeless, chasing the rats from the bathroom,
basement, kicking the dead flies out of the corner spots
where the cat used to lounge-
clean the toilet bowl, a form of revival and resurrection.
I privately pastor to these desires though I myself am homeless.
I forgot what it’s [...]

[Read more →]

I’m going to take Islam where their God has not been before-
to the garden of Jesus, olive oil presses, Gethsemane–
trees, flowers, fruits, vegetables didn’t poison anyone there.
Passion was sweat on the ground and brow.
There weren’t darts of hate, misconception or terrorism;
children on their knees five times a day brainwashed to hate.
Christ didn’t lead them [...]

[Read more →]

It’s calm.
Too quiet.
My clear plastic bowl
serves as my bird feeder.
I don’t hear the distant
scratching, shuffling
of tiny sparrow feet,
the wing dances, fluttering, of a hungry
morning’s lack of big band sounds.
I walk tentatively to my patio window,
spy the balcony with detective eyes.
I witness three newly hatched
toddler sparrows, curved nails, mounted
deep, in their mother’s dead, decaying back.
Their childish [...]

[Read more →]

Edith, in this nursing home
blinded with macular degeneration,
I come to you with your blurry
eyes, crystal sharp mind,
your countenance of grace–
as yesterday’s winds
I have chosen to consume you
and take you away.
“Oh, where did Jesus disappear
to, she murmured,
over and over again,”
in a low voice
dripping words
like a leaking faucet:
“Oh, there He is my my
Angel of the coming.”
About the [...]

[Read more →]

A Métis Indian lady
hands blanketed over as in pray,
spirit gods inside her empty purse,
hang over a large brown fruit basket
naked of fruit, no vine,
approaches the Edmonton, Alberta
adoption agency.
Inside, refrained from life
with a wine sap apple wedged fruity
like a teaspoon of autumn sun
inside the infants mouth,
a shallow pool of tears form–
swell like melons in infant
native blue [...]

[Read more →]

Rebecca fantasized that life was a lottery ticket or a pull of a lever,
that one of the bunch in her pocket was a winner or the slots were a redeemer;
but life itself was not real that was strictly for the mentally insane at the Elgin
Mental Institution..
She gambled her savings away on a riverboat
stuck in mud [...]

[Read more →]

Soft nursing
5 solid minutes
of purr
paw peddling
like a kayak competitor
against ripples of my
60 year old river rib cage–
I feel like a nursing mother
but I’m male and I have no nipples.
Sometimes I feel afloat.
Nikki is a little black skunk,
kitten, suckles me for milk,
or affection?
But she is 8 years old a cat.
I’m her substitute mother,
afloat in a flower [...]

[Read more →]

Crippled with arthritis
and Alzheimer’s,
in a dark rented room
Charley, plays
melancholic melodies
on a dust filled
harmonica he
found abandoned
on a playground of sand
years ago by a handful of children
playing on monkey bars.
He now goes to the bathroom on occasion,
peeing takes forever; he feeds the cat when
he doesn’t forget where the food is stashed at.
He hears bedlam [...]

[Read more →]

Ginger bread lady,
no sugar or cinnamon spice,
years ago arthritis and senility took their toll.
Crippled mind movies in then out, like an old sexual adventure,
blurred in an imagination of finger tip thoughts–
who in hell remembers the characters?
Their was George her lover near the bridge at the Chicago River
she missed his funeral, her friends were there.
She always [...]

[Read more →]