Ticket to Insomnia

Ticket to Insomnia

Before the birth of February, in the nation of Delay
and Crack-up, where folks hunker down hard
on 7-acre slots of knuckle-break volcanic rock,
snow-wind on sun-scorched front porch recliners,

why not plan a bike-ride summer (a thunderstorm-
June fantasia of rattlesnakes coiled on yellow lines)?
Why not buy a creaky can't-be-tuned black Fender
pawn shop guitar (Don't Leave Home Without It)?

Why not, this very night (to hell with summer),
gargle and gulp a schooner of mildewed moon juice
milked from ice fog a week ago.  You're eye-level
with an urn of pulverized bone... life's constituent minerals.


Note: Ticket to Insomnia, by Red Shuttleworth, has been issued as a limited edition (44 signed copies) poetry broadsheet (printed on 32-pound ivory antique laid paper) from Bunchgrass Press (Columbia Basin, WA).

No Resurrection from Cremains

No Resurrection from Cremains

What provision did you hold
for 900-crematorium-degrees...
or paper bundles of blood and biopsy results...
or friendship frail as thin cotton...
or radiation treatment anesthetics?
And then the drive through ice fog
without your friend... no more all-nighters
of poetry, imaginary secret star maps,
two-day-old steak sandwiches
sliced to shreds to share-out
in a stainless steel bowl.

Stainless steel hospital gurney,
Ezekial 37:3, in-fucking-deed,
when tumored bones crumble
and fold into one another.
Empty paw prints in last week's snow,
And no more rants
at pantywaist cocksucker
literati magazine editors...
no...  and there ain't no howling
at this Wolfhound moon...
no, not after the ol' two-syringe kill-trick...
Propofol and Euthanol.
So much for the beauty of rhyme.

You walk your friend's plastic-sacked
five-pounds of furnace-whitened
bone chips around the living room,
set them on his overstuffed leather chair,
on his dog bed, atop the TV cabinet,
walk Wolfie, off the leash, after Bulleit,
down his favorite night trail...
avoid the ready grave.
Professional weepers not needed...
this damned amateur is doing okay.

Red and Wolfie Shuttleworth

2008-2009

WINTER CHRONOGRAPH: The Chapbook

Winter Chronograph

poems

Red Shuttleworth

During the Winter of 2011-2012 Red Shuttleworth, attended by his Irish Wolfhound, Wolfie, wrote his 150+ Winter Chronograph sequence of poems.

The best of Winter Chronograph (33 poems selected by poet / painter Ciara Shuttleworth) is now available, in a limited edition of 44, as a chapbook.  Several of the poems have been revised.

Special thanks go to Cristen Hemingway Jaynes for first publishing "Winter Chronograph: 90" in chum, a literary journal.

If you would like a copy of Winter Chronograph, write or email Red Shuttleworth.

Wolfie Shuttleworth

(May 15, 2007 - January 4, 2013)

a participant in the writing

of Winter Chronograph