December 2015
John Kropf
kropferama@gmail.com
I like playing around with words and sounds even if it turns out to be nonsense.  I like Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Yeats, David Shumate, prose poems and dozens of other poets.  I grew up in small town Ohio and will always feel a Midwesterner but live in Arlington, Virginia with a wife, daughter, a cat and a dog. My day job is working as an attorney but my Walter Mitty fantasy is to write full time.  I have two books to my name: Unknown Sands: Journeys Around the World's Most Isolated Country, a first hand account of traveling the central Asian country of Turkmenistan and a legal reference book that has nothing to do with poetry.   I keep a blog on books and poems on an unscheduled basis, http://compulsivelyaimless.blogspot.com/  http://compulsivelyaimless.blogspot.com/

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Author's Note:  In the late 1800s, my great-grand father founded a crayon company in Sandusky, Ohio. The factory manufactured "American Crayons" brand crayons for over 100 years. In the 1990s, the manufacturing equipment was dismantled and moved to a factory in Mexico but not before the Ohio workers trained their Mexican counterparts. The factory closed its doors, the building fell derelict and is now ready demolition. 

​American Crayons

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Crumbling black brick
with white lettering
Index finger smokestack
Dismantled machines
Lost workers
Instruments of color creation
Kindergarten perceptions
of broccoli stalk trees and beaming suns
an artist's rendering gauzy scenes
of a Boudeaux countryside
cylinders of orange, mauve and maroon
poured, molded, dried
cut, packaged shipped
opened in rooms of A, B, C, 1, 2, 3
and abandoned on a June afternoon
a worn palette of nubs
rolling around
in a busted box





Minor Myth


There was a minor myth
of a neighborhood shape-shifter
I thought I knew which one of us he was
One moonless night I invited him to a bar
on the edge of town
He soon suspected my motives
and slithered away
into the dark weeds.





Sports Spectator at Inverse Proportions


I watched the big game
on the giant screen
with a small mind
and tiny eyes.


©2015 John Kropf