Author Archives: Mikels Skele

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About Mikels Skele

Poet. Explainer. Foreigner-at-large.

Copper kettle

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I realized that, if the Poetic Lineages I post here are mine in some poetically ancestral sense, I have to include things like this folk song:

Get you a copper kettle
Get you a copper coil
Cover with new made corn mash
And never more you’ll toil

Chorus:
You just lay there by the juniper
While the moon is bright
Watch them jugs a-fillin’
In the pale moonlight

Build your fires of hickory
Hickory or ash or oak
Don’t use no green or rotten wood
They’ll catch you by the smoke

(Chorus)

My daddy he made whiskey
My granddaddy did too
We ain’t paid no whiskey tax
Since Seventeen Ninety Two

(Chorus)

Yet another haiku

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A flock of school children
Off on a morning jaunt
Startling blackbirds

Father’s day

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I no longer imagine speaking to him
Explaining what I see of life, alert for the slight
Tremor of the eyelid
Some signal, some connection

Once, in a dream, he called me to join him
Held out a crumbling hand
I kicked him away, catching his chest
Exploding with the dust of dying
Hollow as the years of living

I look at an old photograph,
A young officer, impish gleaming eyes,
A girl on either arm

I think we might have come to terms,
The two of us,
But he died somewhere in the old country
Long before his wraith gave me life

Haiku, too

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You hear, years later,
The bomb went off after all.
Another drink, you think.

Making

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I know something of making, and I’m here to tell you
If the world was made by some grand carpenter
Somewhere there’s a corner
To which all the error has been pushed

Some joint not quite square
Some depth not quite plumb
Some dark unknown fluke
Covered deftly with cosmic caulk

And one hell of a paint job