John Kropf VERSE-VIRTUAL 2016 March

March 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/

Time Not Remembered

Down a nameless street
in a forgotten part of town
behind gray granite walls
and a padlocked gate
lies a dusty courtyard
in pale light
with brittle brown leaves
swept into a corner
long ago
by the last gust of wind
from an abandoned age.

Pinstripe Uprising

Stock straight
pinstripe executives
rise up
on elevators
even straighter
than their suits
or the skyscrapers
lining the avenue
and overlook
the parallels
of the city grid
from on high.