Max

Max is back.
Saw him early this foggy morning
Limping down thirty-second street.

Did you forget where I live
Old skin bone street fighter?
You were fat when you left last April.
This is some kind of free you’re fixed on.

I took him home,
Woke up the wife and kids.

Max is back!


~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Recently Born

So new,
So young,
So ignorant of devious motives,
So free from self-imposed orthodoxies.

So new,
So young.

We race to fill our recently born
With our individual truths,
Our tribal truths,
Our instructions and conclusions,
As if we had no need of change.


~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

If We Choose

Now we know,

We know what will kill us,

If we choose,

If we choose to stare down our genomes,

So comprehensively tabulated,

As if life were nothing,

Nothing more than a roll of the dice,

The genetic dice.

Now every newborn,

Every newborn comes with specifications.

Now every new parent,

Every new parent can look into baby’s eyes

And know what could close those eyes,

What could still that soft and fragile breath,

If we choose.

~ Russ Allison Loar

© All Rights Reserved 

The Secret World

The little ones among us,
So full of the moment,
The eternal “now,”
So disconnected from history,
Without serious contemplation of consequence.

They dance down supermarket aisles,
Flailing arms and legs in outlandish choreographies,
Possessed by some inner music,
Some inner, innate rhythms.

I watch their energetic, unselfconscious geometries with envy.

Would that I could be so free-spirited,
So unconcerned with the observations of others.
Would that I could unleash my inner whirling dervish.

Yet if I began dancing down supermarket aisles
I doubt others would share my joyful abandon.
More than likely I would be suspected of intoxication,
Or some variety of mental impairment.

Watching the little ones gyrating down supermarket aisles
I remember what it was like,
Living in my secret world,
The world of a child my parents left so long ago,
Those practical, preoccupied people,
Pulling me into their world,
Too soon,
Too soon.


~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved