FOUR FEATHERS PRESS ONLINE EDITION: SKY KEY Send up to three poems on the subject of or at least mentioning the words sky and/or key, totaling up to 150 lines in length, in the body of an email message or attached in a Word file to donkingfishercampbell@gmail.com by 11:59 PM PST on March 14th. No PDF's please. Color artwork is also desired. Please send in JPG form. No late submissions accepted. Poets and artists published in Four Feathers Press Online Edition: Sky Key will be published online and invited to read at the Saturday Afternoon Poetry Zoom meeting on Saturday, March 15th between 3 and 5 pm PST.

Friday, March 14, 2025

Jeffry Jensen


NO KEY NO SKY


I could not sleep with the rain hammering

my roof into cosmic submission.

I first thought that there was an instrument of distraction

or maybe more of an instrument of destruction

taking control of the current cellular programming.

The pure pleasure that I take from informative reading

as well as the writing done with a childlike intensity

were tossed into a bin of intellectually poisonous debris.

As a child in cranky Covina, I had a passion for imaginary things.

My inner life flourished behind the garage

and definitely below what God demanded.

I had an uneasy strategy that would take me around the block.

It became all a landscape of exaggeration.

No one was going to out accumulate frustration

when I was around taking aspirations to be no more than baby teeth.

A former coworker hit me up for some quality time in her garden.

There was a prospect that the high-wire act of perfection

would lead me toward her escape hatch of emotional hunger.

I really did not want to ponder the unthinkable on a burrowing afternoon,

but there must be some sort of uplift that comes

with the nurturing of a scrambling suburban imagination.

Bottom line has to be that there will be less bleak Kafkaesque expression

under my breath as I mold a sturdy metaphysical key

in order to unlock a fresh series of aphorisms within a seemingly posthumous sky.


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