Mike Ferguson
Once Sonnets
-
Righteous Anger
Is another clever line
in rhetoric
a righteous anger is
dissolving as I speak?
I hear a rail and then
the clever riposte:
the story of a tongue,
so to say,
in open debate.
It is for a cause,
this complaint
that a god above
whose nothingness is a rant
is cold comfort for
being an oxymoron.
Comments come from
the converted
like self-satisfaction
is a tick on social media.
Who else really knows
this might hurt if hearing?
-
By the Way
Do you see
what isn’t recognised
from good education?
Metaphors that
should beat doing it
‘My Way’:
close the slanted wooden doors
to the cellar of despair
or a conversational aside.
By the way,
I don’t want you,
by the way.
Which is the subordinate clause?
When syntax
is poker’s bad grammatical hand
but still winning.
Do you follow?
Hands down.
-
Me
I was fully aware
with this
that made me laugh out loud
funny and sad
but rather more absurd
the knife to cut
instantly and quickly
slices for later
that I also had
as I was fully aware
entirely on my lonesome
the surprise exultation
Mike Ferguson’s most recent collection is the sonnets chapbook Precarious Real [Maquette Press, 2016]. A retired English teacher, he co-authored the education text Writing Workshops [Cambridge University Press, 2015].