three poems
by Ron Arbuckle
PEOPLE-WATCHING
The people-watching-people are people-watching
They’re people-watching people
Itching, I leap — I am people
People-like-me are being people-watched
By the people watching me
As they people-watch the people
From their people-watching patch
In a patch made for people-watching
People-watching people watch
People, watching people like me
People like me, who need to be watched
By the people-watching people-watchers
People-watchers, like witches
Watching people, pinwheeling gothic epitaphs
In their genethliac watching we wait
Waiting for people to watch
To watch people like me
Is it pathological to cower
Like I’m being watched telepathically?
Like they wait- like they wait to kill pathogens like me?
Why would people-watching people
People-watch a wight like me?
Possibly this gnawing, howling weight
Weighing down on me, as the people-watching-people
Lap past people being people-watched like people like me
Waiting for chinwags and whinging
Against a people-watched people
By the whippet-like people-watchers
Heaping two pence against cephalon-like pigs
They whip upon these pigs,
Pig-wights whipped unethically
The people-watchers, watching people
Who feel like whales being lapped
While lapping the planet, feeling genetically elephantine
A planet where poaching people feels healing
For the people-watching-people
People-watching people like me
I can pitch cheap peptic like a meek tome
For people-watched people to etch change
Change in weight, change in plane
Plain people watched, while waiting on change
Itching to etch out belt-notches like plinths
Killed epoch after epoch, pinching at their plate
“Latch to planche in the loch, ok?”
Till the plotlines of weight leeches in heaps
Their clothes wilting pelts kowtowing
Watched like mulch, eaten by gaunt twig thin sheep
Change is elliptical for people-watched people like me
As the people-watching-people claw, clawing at me
Wheeling me mole-like and weeping to be people-watched
Watched and wheeled hotel to bewitched hotel
By people-watchers peeping philologically
Watching their watches for people-watching
Watching welches, these people wait while copying
People, like nephews, cawing for watching
To people-watch people,
These watching people… will they kill me?
These people-watching-people
People-watching people like me
TRAINSPOTTING
Being hit by a train
gracefully
takes decades
Make your life choices
with its inevitability
in awareness
Pre-grieve it,
see it coming
through the trees
from long before
Lay your ear
to the tracks
& recognize it
looming so soon
It is impossible
for you to reconcile
yourself to the train
in an instant
Though in an instant
it will have arrived
& disappeared
around the bend
gone once and hence gone
as soon as it appears
The train is never late
nor ever when expected
Always right on time
down to the second
Be ready traveler
The train is coming
CLASSIC LITERATURE REVIEW: ‘IF YOU GIVE A MOUSE A COOKIE (1985)’
By LAURA NUMEROFF, Illustrated by FELICIA BOND
The problem with the book,
“If You Give A Mouse A Cookie,”
is it leads you to believe
there is one mouse
with a million desires.
When in reality,
there are a million mice
with but one desire:
Cookies.
BIO: A former minister, then machinist and now accountant, Ron Arbuckle lives in Oklahoma with his wife & two kids on their family farm. After secretly writing it over the last two and a half years for his wife, Ron recently self-published his debut novel, A Matter of Design, and is currently working on a second novel while exploring poetry and other short forms of literary expression. His micro-fic and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Trash Cat Lit, Michigan City Review of Books, Hidden Peak Press and others. You can find his irreverent, poor taste on X: @touchgrass_ron