August 2022
Roy Duffield
royduffield3@gmail.com
Bio Note: I am a writer, translator, and editor over at Anti-Heroin Chic. I once managed to talk my way onto the rooftop in Mexico City where Kerouac wrote Tristessa, and was later honored to be chosen to perform my own work at the 2019 Beat Poetry Festival in Barcelona. You can read more of my work in the Living Haiku Anthology, the Nashville Review and The Dawntreader.

Seed in the Wind

“How much did you pay?
  How many hectares?
  How high are your fences?
  Exactly how square?
  Which sterilisers
  And pesticides do you use?
  And you say you can farm
  The wind, too?
  Then did you choose
  To grow those dandelions there?
  I swear
  There’s one right there.
  I’d help you stamp him out.
  The key’s to stop them growing
  But sadly neither you nor I
  Can lift our dug-in toes.”

The World Gets in the Way

Where are my guys?
All dead before my time?
Or maybe it is I who’ll
be dead before their time.
Yet surely there are some of us,
some who coincide?
©2022 Roy Duffield
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL