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Paul Sohar

The November Chosen Poet is Paul Sohar

Please feel free to email Ace at: sohar.paul@gmail.com

paul

AT HOME

We keep the driveway clean and black,
the lawn green, fertilized and mown,
the bushes nicely trimmed, front and back,
but we no longer sleep at home.

The house is there just like before,
to the neighbors it looks the same;
they have no cause to come to the door
and start looking for someone to blame.

In daytime we must act all right,
we can never let it be known
someone whispers a curse at night,
that’s why we no longer sleep at home.

We must never, ever let it show
that one of us is not quite here
but buried in the cellar deep below,
only to us to re-appear.

Now we have the secret to hide by day,
at night the streets and parks to roam,
at all times a dark comedy to play;
we can no longer sleep at home.

THE WHITE SHADOW OF FANTASY

In a dark blue ocean of nude desires
she lays back on the jewel-studded floor
to seduce a shark to light her fire;
or is it a stingray she’s waiting for?

She waves toward me her willowy arms,
inviting me to lie down next to her,
but my crude and rough limbs lack her charms,
in dry dirt I was made to stay a prisoner.

Only a head of cabbage on the ground,
I dream of living in her retinue,
in turquoise freedom, instead of being bound

to earth where I wait for a pair of boots
to crush me and a bunch of worms to chew
my limbs entombed in dirt as hairy roots.

WHEN GHOST CHILDREN SPEAK

The voices of ghost children grow
like mildew on the tapestry,
they wind around the lily pattern
floating in the background free

where the backs of chairs and sofas turn,
where only cobwebs stand on guard,
that’s where they can wiggle up
on the backs of adults who park

their lives in pointed circles around the
gray litany of the coffee table
till these trickling voices touch their earlobes
with the tingling of a fable

fanned by the naughty unseen children;
then the grown-up backs will twitter,
speak about the temperature
and the snow that’s sure to whither

next week or sooner when these voices
slither back where they came from
and where they send all those who listen
bang into a maelstrom:
say! whispers hone the craft of kissing…

Paul Sohar got a BA in philosophy and a day job in chemistry while writing in every genre, publishing fifteen volumes of translations from Hungarian, most significantly poetry by George Faludy “Silver Pirouettes” (Ragged Sky Press 2017) and Sándor Kányádi “In Contemporary Tense” (Iniquity Press, 2013).His own poetry: “Homing Poems” (Iniquity, 2006) and “The Wayward Orchard”, a Wordrunner Press Prize winner (2011). Prose works: “True Tales of a Fictitious Spy” (Synergebooks, 2006) and a collection of three one-act plays from One Act Depot (Canada, 2014).

Magazines: Agni, Gargoyle, Pedestal, Rattle, and Rhino.