Long Shots Lost | Richard Rauch

1. long shots

What else was there to do
With edgy triangles
Tippling over squares everywhere,
Cornered in an angular city.
No spheres stood a cherry’s chance
Against the cubes, rolling
Away like little lost balls
Tinkling over the ice,
Diminishing in the distance
Through an emptying glass
Of long shots lost.

2. in a corner

On a floor in a corner
In an office crumpled up
Lies a man with a memo
In his hand, filled with lies,
All the details dear to heart,
Clutching vainly at its chest,
On a floor in an office
In a corner crumpled up.

3. freed-

A signature, exhaling and rising,
Standing straight, note folded, positioned, left,
Purposeful walk out to the balcony,
Up and over the railing without pause
And smiling?

                       a headfirst,
                                   chest out
                                             swan dive

Gracefully through the air, down ten stories:
Shout of joy, compelling, summarizing
Forty-seven years in three seconds and
A long last instant of supreme freed-

Richard T. Rauch was born and raised in the suburbs of New Orleans and currently lives along Bayou Lacombe in southeast Louisiana. My work has recently appeared or is about to appear in California Quarterly, Confrontation, decomP, Grey Sparrow, Hotel Amerika and other prominent magazines. Three of his poems appear in the Love Notes poetry anthology (Vagabondage Press, 2012).