David Nelson Bradsher

You might disown my bitter tone
and lump me in with crazy men,
but when I think and speak in ink
you'll have to kill my tilted pen
...

She rises painfully—without complaint—
haloed by silver-white in feathered hair,
and she assists her husband from his chair,
dragging her shadow like a burdened saint.
...

The suits are girded, rallying the troops
with power-point displays at Monday’s meeting,
explaining how a five-year fiscal “oops”
resulted in last week’s employee bleeding.
...

A Year of Sundays

As if a breathing god,
the night exhales a glaze
...

A smudge of a man,
he trudged the blur between
a can-do attitude,
a cruel demeanor,
...

The dust of day's detritus grays the room
as if the ashes of Pompeii
have blurred the atmosphere and smudged the gloom,
grinding the light away.
...

With spite,5: 30 in the morning came,
alarmed, and jarring to his drowsy senses,
bringing to bear the morning-force of blame
that punched and powered through internal fences
...

They walked the dark to dawn,
beneath a moon the hue of butter-crème,
traversing lawn to selfsame lawn,
their breaths cocooned in steam
...

I drive up Ashe, past rows of shotgun shacks
that were erected thirty years ago
as subsidized apartments for the poor;
but now the rich want condos down to Snow,
...

Her vodka-laced pronouncements stung
my eyes with breath of Russian fire—
...

The iron-colored skies present
their plushy soft-tops with the swirled
depictions of a world
that match the furrowed firmament.
...

The coked-up party boys all cruise about,
shouting for more, or more than that, in cars
jetting on Hollywood past sidewalk stars
down Highland to the Sunset In and Out.
...

Agreed, tonight was not my best
performance, but forgive the gaffe
and stifle your insulting laugh.
It surely does affect my rest,
...

The breeze is urgent, crisp, and like a stream
of consciousness that musses thinning hair.
Autumn arrives—she settles like a dream
that brightens life before the trees go bare.
...

My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How come it then that this her cold is so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
...

A Study in Rodin

She strolled with grace—a goddess in a fur—
holding a handbag and a champagne flute.
...

I courted melancholy in a Gordon Lightfoot song,
the softly-aching folly of a yearning to belong,
but that recording cost me and my drained convictions show
how that remembrance lost me to the claws of undertow.
...

The passersby, oblivious to him,
were rushing home to families and fires
as he observed the winter gloaming dim
and fade into a February night.
...

The drapes—as sheer as ghosts—
flutter and gently sway in time
to the soft xylophonic chime
of wind-conducted toasts.
...

Enabled

for Charles Delaine Bradsher, Sr.
...