UNDERGROUND VOICES MAGAZINE/MP POWERS


	UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY

MP POWERS

Avocadoes

Bright morning in August,
deep shadows
moving across the yard.

I pluck an avocado
from the tree and I wonder
is this the meaning of Art? The mystery within
the fruit in my hand. It's so easy for a tree,
but for a man, how many
have actually done it?

I'm thinking about all
the failed artists, all the dead literature,
cankered words.
Work that never was.

I've read too much of it,
and written tomes myself.

The tainted juices.

And how many are doing
the same thing right now, in small rooms all over
America?

Wounded souls
desperate to be saved.
Working-class
sorrows, love unrequited, again and again

and then the torn pieces
of thought
salvaged during the week

scrawled on bits of paper
and the backs of business cards. Pieces of rind
in the end.

Yet so many of us,
still waiting for it to happen.

Knowing it won't.

Maybe it was truth
that got us here first, denial that keeps us.

Sunday morning in
August, in the shade of trees
and waiting to break
out of it
one way or another

the frustration, the lousiness
of the game, the ultimate,

the failure
to bear fruit.

M.P. Powers has been published in Nerve Cowboy, Identity Theory, Poems Niederngasse, Ascent Aspirations, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.