Two Poems by Jason D. DeHart

Lathe

A form turning, the wood shavings
pile up in the floor.
She was told she was beautiful.
A father holds the keys to the car
out, says, Don't put a scratch on it.
But he kind of loved her.
A grandmother tells someone else's
daughter not to wear so much makeup,
makes her look like a harlot.
She wants to say stop, but cannot.
A kind man decides not to be quite so
nice anymore because he's tired of footprints
and glass in his back.
The world they built together is over.
We separate the thousand elements we are not
from the single molecules we are.
Shavings pile up in the floor.



Alphabet Soup

Using Arabic symbols and sounds
in the throat, we spell
our love for one another, or
our vitriol.
Love, really, love?
It's a broad sound, a wavering
structure.
We raise theories about time,
God, and space, all confined
within the fractured space
of the human mouth.
Language, an arbitrary set of phonemes,
words constructed from smaller points,
the bones of lost meanings
making new frightening creatures.
Our bright colors tell one another
to hold some people in high regard;
to belittle others.  The old-fashioned
in-crowd and those to be excluded.
We use whom, but never in public.
Worse yet, we hide our meanings behind
the shadow of semantics, adding shades
to the grunts and sighs.




Jason D. DeHart is the author of the blog, jasondehartjustliving.blogspot.com.  His writing has appeared in a variety of publications.