Evidence (A Sonnet)

If you could see the dogs I watch at night
These beasts that listen more when they are fed
With meat, they hear me talk about my plight
My dearest wife is surely mostly dead
I tried to kill her many times before
But only once, with dogs, came out to dine
And when her blood dripped off the teethy gore
My woes spilled out at once like aging wine
If you can sit with me at heavens gate
You'll hear the story that I long to tell
That time when I arrived for my last date
And mutts grew silent from the tolling bell
That night, I too, did wash my fingers clean
From crime and blood that only dogs have seen

Rosie The Riveter

She wished she had worn make-up

the day she became an icon

But sweat burned her cheeks like gasoline

her shirt stained with factory oil

hair cut short, efficient

She barely even smirked

Some lipstick wouldn’t hurt

A little color in this black and white world

If she had the time

she’d pull out her old paint

sculpt brows on a flawless face

throw on her dependable red, his favorite

flash her whitest smile for

a camera that made her look pretty

Outside her industrial fortress 
guarded by structure and lines

Before biceps bulged and

eyes turned gray

She was Mary from New Hampshire

Homecoming queen, wife, mother of four

Now, she is the new woman

immortalized in propaganda, the good kind

Hope, equality, something grand like that

But still, she hopes

Somewhere far away

a man remembers his wife
a pretty woman in a red dress

To the boy with pretty hair

You are an unfinished poem

Half-formed ideas and phrases

sentences that couldn’t make it past the page

We were almost there but you

couldn’t help me find the words 

You are my writer’s block

a love poem written while half asleep

whose metaphors die with dawn

I awake to a page of scrawls

finger smudges in my half-baked mess

The seeds of an epic narrative, maybe

But for now, nothing more than

symbols, lines

an unfinished clause
A sonnet that ended before its final rhyme