John Kropf VERSE-VIRTUAL 2016 April

April 2016

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/

Lost City

To the untrained eye
it was nothing
But when I heard they found the lost city
covered in the sands of the high desert
I thought of
the last inhabitant
on his last night
inside the city walls
and how he walked away from its crumbling ruins
into the morning sun
turning the city into a tomb

But then I had to think
of the first person
on his first night
who settled on this hillside
and decided at sunrise
that he would turn his settlement into a city

Trash Day

We know
it's trash day eve
when green and blue bins
picket the street
like sentries
posted curbside
to stand watch
through the night
until trash trucks
smash the dawn
and flip idiot lids
relieving us
of our discarded histories.