Road Sign Poetry and Other Thoughts 2026

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A couple times a year, I clean out my journal and memorialize some of the contents. A string of short poetry, doggeral, and observations that have no other home but to share with you here. 


Road Sign Poetry


We start with the stiff injunction of the red octagon

halt and look both ways. 

Down the road

the yellow diamond featuring a gentle curved arrow 

warns that the road bends ahead

reduce speed before reaching the curve 

someone cares enough to keep you on the right path.

Then there is its cousin, with the black intersection cross 

you have choices to make.

And the upside down triangle of Yield --

the most misunderstood of signs 

--and therefore ignored

but I guess wait your turn isn’t short enough.

At last there is the cool green with white typeface

with distances to the cities, 

great and small

how many miles to your future hopes and dreams 

or your safe return home.


 

Language and Fashion


As the world becomes more casual with information 

Everyone seems to dress language in sweatpants

Newscasters now greet their reporters, 

“Hey there”

Like dorm mates passing in the hall. 



Empty Schoolyard


Your home ground left a mark on your memory

but when you leave, 

do your memories leave with you

or do some stay behind settling into the landscape

like fossils embedded under the schoolyard swing set?


 

Sharp Sleep


A bed of nails

May cure what ails

But its such a sharp sleep 

you can’t count sheep.


 

Get Help


In the day

he was forlorn without Hope.

At night

he was mad with liquor.



Circle of Life


From his small town, 

he heard the call of the big city. 

Years later 

in the big city, 

he heard the call of his small town.



Ghosts Ask No Questions


He discovered the birthplace of ghosts. 

Dumbfounded

he wondered,

how many ghosts can one man have?

But this was the place 

where no questions could be be asked.


 

Poets and Engineers


Both got us to the moon

but poets without the slide rules 

and engineers without the words

Dreamers and mathematicians working together.



Poem to Ludwig Wittgenstein


You final words

where one cannot speak 

one must be silent.

What else is there to say when it’s all been said

Except you went on writing 

About language games and family resemblances

living as a hermit on the stormy coast of Norway 

and teaching elementary school children how to spell.

 

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